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Hierarchy9990
2011-07-18, 06:47 PM
Hi I'm new here, and I was just wanted to ask this of the players who like to role play as the opposite gender. How do you do it? To me role playing as the other sex is a pretty difficult task, and I find it pretty cool how some people can pull it off without it becoming cliche or sexist. I've tried it couple of times(in video games), and when I play a girl it always just feels.. Uncomfortable.

I guess I just need a way to associate with my characters, and playing as a girl feels too alien to me. But I know there's a lot of people can pull it off so if there is anyone here guy or girl who enjoys role playing like this, please post. I'm interested to hear how you do it.

Yukitsu
2011-07-18, 06:52 PM
Well, I failed an IRL gender test, so I'm not sure which one counts as the opposite, but generally, I just play them about the same. There are a few circumstances where I think gender is going to really make a difference in how they react to things, but in general, the way guys and gals react to most fantasy scenarios are pretty much more similar than they are dissimilar. I tend to find most concerted efforts to play the other gender as something different end up as mildly uncomfortable sexist parodies anyway.

hivedragon
2011-07-18, 06:52 PM
Lately I've been playing pregens, I usually end up playing a girl. This has never ended up as a problem for me. I can see it might be an issue if we actually RPed sex or seduction but that would be awkward whatever gender we played as.

NecroRebel
2011-07-18, 06:53 PM
The trouble you're probably having is that you're trying to roleplay "a girl." Females aren't defined by their sex and don't define themselves by their gender. Females happen to be people. To roleplay a female believably, you should play her more-or-less exactly as you would roleplay a male believably.

That's probably the best advice you can get: people are people, regardless of their organs. While there are certainly differences between how men and women behave, they're minor, and the differences between two men or two women are larger than between men as a category and women as a category. For now, while you're starting out, you shouldn't really play women differently from men. That's a more subtle piece of acting that you can learn as you become more experienced. Most people, honestly, won't even notice.

Remmirath
2011-07-18, 07:05 PM
Well, I've never understood why it's said to be so difficult. People all have different personalities anyhow, so most characters won't be that much like yourself no matter what - gender's an awfully small part of the differences between most characters and yourself.

I suppose that may really the thing of it, to just develop a personality for your character not worrying about whether it's appropriate for a male or female character, since it could work for either no matter what (it could be unlikely sometimes, but I cannot come up with an example where it just would not work). I couldn't really say how I do it - I just do it, and it doesn't seem different. It's still coming up with a character and then playing that character. I'd find it a bit dull if I played only female characters, so I generally play about half of each.

The greatest stumbling block I've encountered is if the group will always refer to the character by your gender even if they are not the same (sometimes even after you're corrected them several times :smallannoyed:), but that's a problem with the group in that case and in my experience usually indicative of a group that doesn't really care about the whole 'playing a character' part of roleplaying.

FatJose
2011-07-18, 07:10 PM
Stuff
I agree with this completely.

What might help you is this-
Make a male character, think up his personality, back story and everything else as you would normally. Then just flip the gender. Poof. Almost done. Make tweaks where applicable if gender would have altered anything somewhat. And if you still feel there needs to be something to make her more "authentic" maybe take a personality trait or two from a woman you know.

Hierarchy9990
2011-07-18, 07:13 PM
Lately I've been playing pregens, I usually end up playing a girl. This has never ended up as a problem for me. I can see it might be an issue if we actually RPed sex or seduction but that would be awkward whatever gender we played as.


The trouble you're probably having is that you're trying to roleplay "a girl." Females aren't defined by their sex and don't define themselves by their gender. Females happen to be people. To roleplay a female believably, you should play her more-or-less exactly as you would roleplay a male believably.

That's probably the best advice you can get: people are people, regardless of their organs. While there are certainly differences between how men and women behave, they're minor, and the differences between two men or two women are larger than between men as a category and women as a category. For now, while you're starting out, you shouldn't really play women differently from men. That's a more subtle piece of acting that you can learn as you become more experienced. Most people, honestly, won't even notice.


I think gender is going to really make a difference in how they react to things, but in general, the way guys and gals react to most fantasy scenarios are pretty much more similar than they are dissimilar.

Nice points! I personally think going into roleplaying the other gender is best when you take a neutral approach, and do what you would do, not what you think a girl would or "should" do.




I can see it might be an issue if we actually RPed sex or seduction but that would be awkward whatever gender we played as.

Haha yeah I can see how things can get weird especially if your doing this in RL, though the looks on the peoples faces would be kind of funny.

WarKitty
2011-07-18, 07:14 PM
For the beginner, yes, pretty much just roleplay an opposite gender character as you would one of the same gender. Do this until you get used to it.

Once you've gotten that, start thinking about how their gender might affect the way society perceives them. This of course depends on the character and the world. For a female fighter, might she have experienced being viewed as less accomplished or skilled for being female? For a male sorcerer, might he have been teased for shying away from traditional fighting roles? How would these have affected the character?

Hierarchy9990
2011-07-18, 07:21 PM
I agree with this completely.

What might help you is this-
Make a male character, think up his personality, back story and everything else as you would normally. Then just flip the gender. Poof. Almost done. Make tweaks where applicable if gender would have altered anything somewhat. And if you still feel there needs to be something to make her more "authentic" maybe take a personality trait or two from a woman you know.


start thinking about how their gender might affect the way society perceives them. This of course depends on the character and the world. For a female fighter, might she have experienced being viewed as less accomplished or skilled for being female? For a male sorcerer, might he have been teased for shying away from traditional fighting roles? How would these have affected the character?


These are nice ideas. Though I don't really have an interest in actually playing a girl, I was just curious on how other people did it. :smallsmile:

Though if I decide that I wanna mix it up a bit, and play an Adeptus Sororitas or something, I'll definitely use these methods.

WarKitty
2011-07-18, 07:25 PM
As a practical matter, I've found the players good at playing an opposite sex character tend to be the people who aren't really stereotypical for their own sex.

Hierarchy9990
2011-07-18, 07:30 PM
As a practical matter, I've found the players good at playing an opposite sex character tend to be the people who aren't really stereotypical for their own sex.

Hmm I see.. Then I should have little trouble easing into the role eh? :smallbiggrin:

Rixx
2011-07-18, 07:51 PM
Personally I would think the difference between a human and an elf or dwarf, personality or mindset wise, would be much greater than that between a male and female human.

If you think you can believably play an elf, you can believably play a differently gendered character.

WarKitty
2011-07-18, 07:55 PM
Personally I would think the difference between a human and an elf or dwarf, personality or mindset wise, would be much greater than that between a male and female human.

If you think you can believably play an elf, you can believably play a differently gendered character.

The problem here is it's really hard to play an unbelievable elf, because elves aren't real. So as long as you basically stay within the provided description, it works.

There are, however, real men and women.

onthetown
2011-07-18, 08:01 PM
I like making male characters because I feel that certain concepts just go really well as opposed to female (I'm running a bastard prince at the moment; bastard princess just doesn't have the same ring to it). Unfortunately, I only tend to have one in the party (and I run a lot of characters at the same time) because I have a hard time making the voice distinguishable from my female characters.

If it wasn't for the voice thing, heck, I think my party would be pretty evenly split between males and females. I get along better with guys and find them easier to associate with, so they're easier for me to play.

McStabbington
2011-07-18, 08:52 PM
I think of a man. And then I take away reason and accountability. Oh wait, that's how you play chaotic stupid, not a woman. . .

The key to playing a character of a different gender is a several step process. First, look at your character concept and decide whether gender matters at all. Because the weird thing about motivations? They're pretty gender neutral. "Insecure bully who isn't as smart as they think they are" is a character concept that other people will get and understand, and applies to a person no matter what gender a person is. So if your character concept is gender neutral and something you can execute? Then your job is done: you have successfully played a character of the opposite gender.

But sometimes, what your motivation is or how you execute it changes based on your gender. "Insecure bully who isn't as smart as they think they are" applies to Season One G'Kar from Babylon 5. It also applies to Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones. Despite the fact that they can be described in similar elemental ideas, the society that they live in radically shapes how they go about their business and their expectations. G'Kar possesses enormous physical strength and durability, is a member of his people's ruling body, and his actions are driven by the vivid recollection of all the horrors he's seen at the hands of the Centauri. Cersei Lannister is a woman in a society that doesn't value women, in a family that doesn't value women, who has to fight through proxies. So despite the same basic description, they have vastly different methods of execution and even different conceptions of their problems.

G'Kar conceptualizes his victories in terms of the physical domination that he is so used to. Cersei conceives it as using the tools that are afforded to her to allow her to beat people who are better-armed in the game of life.

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-18, 09:21 PM
I will agree that society does put pressure on people to conform to gender roles. However, given that DnD is a fantasy game with many settings being fairly gender neutral, if you choose to make a character that is responding to gender roles, make sure to respond to the correct gender roles.

You can't just use Cersei as a model and dump her into any old fantasy culture. She might be a well written character, but her circumstances will not be universal. Sometimes, women will be allowed to fight physically, or even encouraged to do so. If your game happens in a world like this, then a character who only uses one type of violence when they have access to another can be quite baffling without some sort of explanation.

Also, while some gender roles might shape a character, do add more to them. So your female character is made fun of for swinging a sword, and the male sorcerer who prefers to wear robes get a few odd looks. This alone does not make a personality, and focusing on gender roles will probably just annoy or bore your fellows at the table.

Tyndmyr
2011-07-18, 09:28 PM
While the above advice is generally pretty solid, it is occasionally hilarious to play as a stereotype of a gender. Hell, the barbarian class pretty much is a walking stereotype.

Just make sure it fits the feel of the game before you decide to play Trixie the pixie, who sneak attacks with her boobs.

Yukitsu
2011-07-18, 09:32 PM
While the above advice is generally pretty solid, it is occasionally hilarious to play as a stereotype of a gender. Hell, the barbarian class pretty much is a walking stereotype.

Just make sure it fits the feel of the game before you decide to play Trixie the pixie, who sneak attacks with her boobs.

This reminds me of my paladin rogue who sneak attack smote with his *ahem* man parts.

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-18, 09:34 PM
This reminds me of my paladin rogue who sneak attack smote with his *ahem* man parts.

How are you confused for anything but a man gender wise again?

Yukitsu
2011-07-18, 09:40 PM
How are you confused for anything but a man gender wise again?

I failed a psychological gender measurement test in university, which is a bit different. Most people just assume you are what their eyes see, even if your personality clashes with it a little. Mostly because men and women are mostly the same, those little differences in personality aren't actually that notable by contrast to your appearance. (which is why I recommend you play them as basically the same thing.)

That and the above situation came up as pure rules lawyering. Was chained to a wall, being attacked by a succubus. Which happens with distressing frequency. But at least it wasn't hags that time. :smallwink:

hydroplatypus
2011-07-18, 10:12 PM
As many have said generally it is good to play a different gender the same as your own gender. That being said there are a few situations where you should be careful.

1. Don't play a character who sleeps around. This will greatly creep out everyone at your gaming group.
2. Ignore any situation where anyone (Pc or NPc) flirts with you as this is also creepy.

Other then that play as you normally would

Remmirath
2011-07-18, 10:29 PM
I believe that in the majority of settings people play in, gender roles don't have much of an impact. There's usually no sort of stigma about whatever class you would like to be either way, for instance.

It would probably make more of a difference in, say, drow society.


As many have said generally it is good to play a different gender the same as your own gender. That being said there are a few situations where you should be careful.

1. Don't play a character who sleeps around. This will greatly creep out everyone at your gaming group.
2. Ignore any situation where anyone (Pc or NPc) flirts with you as this is also creepy.

Other then that play as you normally would

I would like to point out that, while this could certainly be a problem in many groups, it wouldn't be in all. Particularly in groups where everyone is especially good at seperating in-character from out-of-character. Knowing what your group is comfortable with is a good idea in general, I would say, and if you don't know then it is indeed likely advisable to err on the side of caution.

Obviously if that were all or most of what their was to the character it would quickly become aggravating, but my personal take on it is that the character shouldn't have to ignore everything flirtatious if it would be out of character for them to do so.

Tyndmyr
2011-07-18, 10:30 PM
This reminds me of my paladin rogue who sneak attack smote with his *ahem* man parts.

I would allow this on the basis of being hilarious.

WarKitty
2011-07-18, 10:33 PM
I believe that in the majority of settings people play in, gender roles don't have much of an impact. There's usually no sort of stigma about whatever class you would like to be either way, for instance.

It would probably make more of a difference in, say, drow society.



I would like to point out that, while this could certainly be a problem in many groups, it wouldn't be in all. Particularly in groups where everyone is especially good at seperating in-character from out-of-character. Knowing what your group is comfortable with is a good idea in general, I would say, and if you don't know then it is indeed likely advisable to err on the side of caution.

Obviously if that were all or most of what their was to the character it would quickly become aggravating, but my personal take on it is that the character shouldn't have to ignore everything flirtatious if it would be out of character for them to do so.

I think it's still good advice for someone not sure of playing an opposite-sex character. Not because it can't be done, but because there's a whole minefield of stereotypes and it can become an issue much more quickly. The "man who plays a big-boobed female slut" is a stereotype for a reason.

That said, I have had a male player play a female sorceress who used sex to get what she wanted when she could. And it worked. Quite well. We all loved that character.

Hierarchy9990
2011-07-18, 10:33 PM
As many have said generally it is good to play a different gender the same as your own gender. That being said there are a few situations where you should be careful.

1. Don't play a character who sleeps around. This will greatly creep out everyone at your gaming group.
2. Ignore any situation where anyone (Pc or NPc) flirts with you as this is also creepy.

Other then that play as you normally would

1. No problem. I'm not the promiscuous type anyway. Not even in a fantasy setting.

2. Hmm.. Easier said than done. I'm pretty easy flattered, and I do like attentio- OH you mean if I'm playing as a girl! Ignore the perverts, fictional or otherwise. Gotcha.

Remmirath
2011-07-18, 10:43 PM
I think it's still good advice for someone not sure of playing an opposite-sex character. Not because it can't be done, but because there's a whole minefield of stereotypes and it can become an issue much more quickly. The "man who plays a big-boobed female slut" is a stereotype for a reason.

That said, I have had a male player play a female sorceress who used sex to get what she wanted when she could. And it worked. Quite well. We all loved that character.

Yeah, that's a good point. Some care should be taken, at the least - I think I was forgetting the 'beginning advice' part.

Kalirren
2011-07-19, 12:56 AM
Hi I'm new here, and I was just wanted to ask this of the players who like to role play as the opposite gender. How do you do it? To me role playing as the other sex is a pretty difficult task, and I find it pretty cool how some people can pull it off without it becoming cliche or sexist. I've tried it couple of times(in video games), and when I play a girl it always just feels.. Uncomfortable.

I guess I just need a way to associate with my characters, and playing as a girl feels too alien to me. But I know there's a lot of people can pull it off so if there is anyone here guy or girl who enjoys role playing like this, please post. I'm interested to hear how you do it.

I typically play female characters, for the reason that playing a male character often feels so similar to my own self-image that it's unappealing for me. I typically dislike the idea that the character I'm roleplaying is a projection of myself into the game world, even though they usually are; but having an avatar of opposite sex makes it easier for me to suspend disbelief.

As for how I do it, I used to think it was harder when I was newer to it, and certainly thought it was harder before I had my first relationship with a girl iRL. But after that hurdle it became really easy. There's really very little substantive difference between the way men and women think and feel about most things, and the lack of overlap between the two sexes' emotional gamuts comprises a very, very, small set of situations. If you've never played an opposite-sex character before, steer clear of those situations. No rape backgrounds, no compulsive sexual extroversion, etc. Most people are normal. Your character can be too.

My advice to learn how to play characters of the opposite sex would just be to start playing one, and start to get a feeling for when your characters' actions and reactions are stereotypically motivated, as opposed to personally motivated. I would put it forth that it's easier to deal with the initial alienness of an opposite-sex character if you play a character who is also different in some other substantive, inherent way. For instance, my own first extensive experience was playing an elven woman in a predominantly human setting, and I'd played elves before, and dealing with being an woman on top of being an elf is actually less taxing on the RP skills when compared to dealing with being a woman and portraying that difference in its isolation.

GoblinArchmage
2011-07-19, 01:17 AM
Since nobody has pointed this out yet, there is a difference between sex and gender. Sex is, quite simply, whether one has female anatomy or male anatomy. It is biological and means absolutely nothing. Gender, on the other hand, is an identity, and includes more options than just "female" and "male." Roleplaying the opposite sex, therefore, is not particularly complicated. Roleplaying a different gender, though, may or may not be more challenging.

Knaight
2011-07-19, 01:17 AM
I think it's still good advice for someone not sure of playing an opposite-sex character. Not because it can't be done, but because there's a whole minefield of stereotypes and it can become an issue much more quickly. The "man who plays a big-boobed female slut" is a stereotype for a reason.

Yes, but that really has more to do with a rut. If the first character you see a man play is the "big-boobed female slut", or you see one, then another one, then yet another one, there is clearly an issue. If a character that could be described as that -though not only that- shows up once, its probably not an issue.

In short, don't start with a character like this, and probably avoid it until you already have established trust with your group regarding playing characters in a mature manner, regardless of their sex.

As for role playing the opposite sex, come up with a character. If it fits a particular sex, or fantasy species, or hair color, go with it. Outside of the absolute core of the character, from the tiny details to large events of the life, just go with whatever fits, and let the details that aren't established change to fit.

Kojiro
2011-07-19, 01:17 AM
Two of the best possible points were already made, those being that there are very few major psychological differences between the genders that are likely to come up (unless this is a certain type of setting), and don't over-sexualize the character either. You'll probably hurt the character's believability, and you may come off as creepy as well; you don't have to avoid romantic-ish interactions entirely, but getting pervy with your friends is a good way to get a bad reputation.

Actually, this is good advice in general, when it comes to characters that aren't "normal" for you, be it that they're the opposite gender (or something else), gay/bisexual, insane, or whatever: While that trait is a part of their character, and possibly a major one, it should not be their defining trait. In other words, there should be more to them than <insert trait here>; your character should not just be summed up as "the woman", or "the gay guy"; if people can describe your character in so few words (assuming they aren't the kind of person who doesn't pay attention or care), you're probably doing something wrong. Or they're the only person in the group like that; you could, for example, call Haley "the chick" (people about to bring V's gender or whatever up, you know what I mean here), as she is (maybe) the only female in the group, but that's just because, again, she's the only female in the group, and it's pretty obvious that there's far more to the character than her gender. Anyway, getting off-topic.

If people are interested, I could provide some of my characters (albeit ones from non-DnD things) as examples of ways I think this works, but I personally think I made the point up there pretty well.

tordirycgoyust
2011-07-19, 04:25 AM
General society notes: on average, Men behave less conservatively than women and are more concerned with large, loose social networks and less with small, intimate networks. These stereotypes are the natural inclination for, say, 75% of women and 50% of men. The practical importance of these stereotypes is in inverse proportion to how advanced and peaceful the society is.

As an adventurer, you are so off to one side of the bell curve that the only part of the above that applies is that there will almost always be fewer female adventurers than male and this may or may not influence NPC reactions slightly.

Yora
2011-07-19, 05:10 AM
Hi I'm new here, and I was just wanted to ask this of the players who like to role play as the opposite gender. How do you do it? To me role playing as the other sex is a pretty difficult task, and I find it pretty cool how some people can pull it off without it becoming cliche or sexist.
Just the same way I play an elf or a wizard. I say "I play a female character" and then just play it. Easy as that.

panaikhan
2011-07-19, 07:09 AM
I have played a whole gamut of characters, of varying sexes.
I have played the stereotypes (womanizing male, promiscuous female).
I have played characters that the rest of the party had to guess the gender for a long time (e.g. Vaarsuvious).
I have played characters of neither gender (generally Warforged, but it also applies to races where the gender differences make no sense at all to 'humans')
I have played characters of both gender (this one would take too much explaining, so I won't).

All in all, play what you are comfortable with. If body shape wouldn't make a difference to you, neither should gender - only in how the rest of the world reacted.

Adamaro
2011-07-19, 07:45 AM
Ültra sexists.

KineticDiplomat
2011-07-19, 08:55 AM
Well, here's the problem to my eyes: there is an utter, complete, and fundamental difference in the entire life, social raising, economic balance, societal interaction, acceptable mores and mindset, and group think attributed personality development between the two genders.

Even if there were no pyschiatric differences (which science indicates there definitively are, based on chemicals, physiology, neural "wiring", and more), the societal differences and the resultant development of character and personality inherently mean that there is a huge barrier to overcome...and that would be in our own, reasonably egalitarian world.

Put another way: why do you think the majority of this board is male if males and females think and act the same, enough to the point where switching is easy? There are outliers, but its pretty indictive that something, physical or societal, has a shaping effect that means genders are NOT as easy as "play an elf."

And, as someone pointed out, while you can play "long eared human with minor differences" elf because inherently we revert to human basic as reasonable seeming RP, if you play the opposite gender your likely to end up as one of the following (they are male perspectives given the majoity male involvement in the hobby):

Man with boobs. Acts like a man, talks like a man, views the world through the lense of a man, occassionally inserts something womanly when it will have minimal consequence. Only brings out the female portion as a a class feature (usually for social situations and gaining access to places) At this point...why not just play a man, and spend the effort on developing the character rather than making gender the pony? Of course, if the point is to fill a party role niche (we need a female because they access to things females can), go for it.

Man with boobs EXCEPT for when I have my love interest. See above, only add "acts supporting role, falls in love with a man."

Lesbian Ninja Stripper Elf with daddy issues. This one doesn't need explanation.

Pantomime: You take a combination based on your perceptions of how the opposite gender works, through in a great leveling dose of "we are all equal, that way we know that", and do your best. Its not bad. Maybe it even reads like a minor female character in a book...but as a PC, you aren't a minor character. Your one of the HMFIC's of the story.

Not to say it shouldn't be done, just that it will probably be very difficult to feel authentic. Even more so than an elf. Because you can be forced to think "how would an elf view this", but for most gender related roles, the way you think about things is as unthinking as breathing. You just do.

Nero24200
2011-07-19, 09:11 AM
I'll just echo what others have said that playing a female character shouldn't require any extra effort than a male character and vice versa.

D'n'D settings seem to have better gender equality than RL, so unless you're playing in a setting where sexism exists to some degree playing a male/female character is purely an aestetic choice.

Ravens_cry
2011-07-19, 09:45 AM
Just because there is equality does not mean there is sameness. Humans are hardwired, if you can't you are far less likely to reproduce, to know and care about the difference between male and females. So when a performance is off, it feels wrong in a uncanny valley kind of way. We aren't hardwaired to know the differance between dwarves and elves.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy playing opposite gender roles, for similar reasons I like playing a half orc or an elf, playing someone I am not. But there does need to be some thought put into it.
Yes, it is an aesthetic choice, so is any aspect of personality. How a certain person of a certain gender expresses those differences is also subject to wide variation. There, oh gods, should not be separate rules for separate genders. Way to the Dark Side that is. It may not be a huge difference most of the time, but it shouldn't simply be dismissed as non-existent either, in my opinion.
My advice on playing a woman as a man? Don't play Bimbo the Slutty.
Please don't. :smalleek:

Comet
2011-07-19, 09:51 AM
I'll just echo what others have said that playing a female character shouldn't require any extra effort than a male character and vice versa.

D'n'D settings seem to have better gender equality than RL, so unless you're playing in a setting where sexism exists to some degree playing a male/female character is purely an aestetic choice.

I'm going to disagree on this one. Roleplaying is not a visual medium, so playing another gender just "for the looks" makes no sense.

You need to have some reason to play the opposite gender and, for the most part, the subtle differences in body and mind plus the different ways society treats men and women are the reason to go to. I don't quite remember any settings where men and women were treated exactly the same, not in D&D and even less so in some other games.

In the end, and this is my opinion on the matter so no hard feelings, discussing the differences in attitude towards men and women respectively in any given setting is completely okay. It's all make believe anyway, and a world that is unfair towards women/men creates conflict if a player decides to create a character of said gender. And conflict is what makes the game fun, it's what drives a good story.

CarpeGuitarrem
2011-07-19, 10:14 AM
Very thorough explanation
Agreed. I don't think it's sexist to play men and women as different. They are. It's not just reproductive organs; it's brain structure, hormonal conditioning...the physiological differences which impact psychology are huge.

And then there's the practical impacts of those differences, even disregarding society. The basic fundamental point being, men and women are not going to respond to the same situations in the same ways. That's not sexism. It's science.

Like Ravens_cry notes, equality does not mean sameness.

At the same time, don't base your RP of an opposite-sex character (using "sex" here, because I'm not talking about societal gender roles) on outward "at a glance" impressions. Heck, you could do some research...find an actress you know, or a female gamer, and ask for tips. Take some women with strong character whom you know personally, and infuse that into your RP.

Hard, yes. Doable, also yes, even if it wouldn't quite be as good.

Severus
2011-07-19, 01:54 PM
The trouble you're probably having is that you're trying to roleplay "a girl." Females aren't defined by their sex and don't define themselves by their gender. Females happen to be people. To roleplay a female believably, you should play her more-or-less exactly as you would roleplay a male believably.

That's probably the best advice you can get: people are people, regardless of their organs. While there are certainly differences between how men and women behave, they're minor, and the differences between two men or two women are larger than between men as a category and women as a category. For now, while you're starting out, you shouldn't really play women differently from men. That's a more subtle piece of acting that you can learn as you become more experienced. Most people, honestly, won't even notice.

This. I play either depending upon what occurs to me in character concept development. People plumbing comes up only rarely. If you're finding it a big deal, it is probably because you're a teenager who thinks about people plumbing all the time :smallbiggrin:

Arbane
2011-07-19, 02:20 PM
Well, here's the problem to my eyes: there is an utter, complete, and fundamental difference in the entire life, social raising, economic balance, societal interaction, acceptable mores and mindset, and group think attributed personality development between the two genders.


...But playing someone small enough to be in the middle of the food-chain instead of the top, or with a vastly longer lifespan? Those are EASY, as long as they've got the same reproductive role! The same goes for beings descended from lizards, trees, demons, or intelligent crystals.

Yukitsu
2011-07-19, 02:34 PM
Agreed. I don't think it's sexist to play men and women as different. They are. It's not just reproductive organs; it's brain structure, hormonal conditioning...the physiological differences which impact psychology are huge.


Where did you hear that? Most physiological, genetic psychological differences between men and women are virtually negligible, and they score within the same ranges on most personality profiling tests.

Mono Vertigo
2011-07-19, 03:14 PM
So, almost everybody else said what I was about to say on stereotypes and how gender is not a personality in and of itself, so that's covered.
No, I'm posting just to say that yes, men and women are different*. A man has different reproductive organs, differences in hormone production, and some physical differences that are more aesthetic than anything. Women, in addition, get to bear babies without much, if any external help after fecundation. That's about all.
The rest? Result of specific standards in breeding. Tall, strong men, and sensible, maternal women got more chances to pass on their genes because it made sense to make that distinction to survive once. Today, we can all agree it's no longer necessary to give specific roles to each gender, as our standards not only changed quite a bit, but aren't any longer limited to gender. No child's life will suffer if their mother is the strong one, and their father the sensible one! The differences in physiology are most likely due to selection (like you don't see many people, say, with a physically obvious genetic defect, because they are rarely considered good genetic donors). As for the differences in behaviour... well... how can I say... the gender conditioning starts out basically at birth, so of course most men and women don't quite behave the same, that's because they've always been taught not to!
So, huh, yeah, I'm going there: in this case of nature vs nurture, nurture wins.



*For the sake of argument, nobody in my example is transexual, and everyone is fertile.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-19, 03:17 PM
I've always played a lot of differently-gendered characters. I don't consider it very difficult. I make it work by using my female associates, as well as female characters from fiction, as reference points. When sex or gender do come up, "what would my mother do?" answers surprisingly many questions.

All in all, humans are humans. It's not remarkably more difficult to get inside the head of a woman than it is to relate to a person of your own sex that's from a foreign culture. It's a matter of practice, really.

One thing I'd like to say, though - it isn't easier to play an inhuman creature than it is to play another sex or gender. It's just that many people have extremely lazy standards for inhuman behaviour. A lot of players will allow inhumans to be played as nothing but humans with fancy hats.

(On the flipside, inhuman creatures, especially those shaped like humans, would not have so alien mindset as to be completely unrelatable. Love (or attachment) and hate, pain and fear, joy and sorrow are pretty ubiquitous mental qualities in animals of all sorts.)



1. Don't play a character who sleeps around. This will greatly creep out everyone at your gaming group.
2. Ignore any situation where anyone (Pc or NPc) flirts with you as this is also creepy.


Reminds me of a Sacred Prostitute character I made. She was the oldest, plainest-looking, and only sensibly dressed character in the game. :smalltongue:


Where did you hear that? Most physiological, genetic psychological differences between men and women are virtually negligible, and they score within the same ranges on most personality profiling tests.
Not quite. On the psychological side, upbringing and education matter more than sex, that's true - but once those are controlled for, the impact of sex is pretty clear. On the physical side, the differences are even more notable. Humans are sexually dimorphic species, and it shows in a lot of things.

However, no matter how great the average differences are, a lot (maybe most) people are not average. It's possible to have a person with a clearly male body, but female mind, or vice versa. It's possible, though rare, to have a body that's both male and female, or neither. But they tend to be expections that prove the rule.

Yukitsu
2011-07-19, 03:24 PM
That's what I'm arguing isn't true though. Take into account absolutely all differences and you'll still be virtually unable to determine the differences between men and women based on their personalities and perception of the world. The only topic they have any serious divergence of opinion on at all is gender.

Alternately, I guess I could ask, just what do you think a female character should do to differentiate herself from a male character? Why would they act significantly differently in the same situations and scenarios?

WarKitty
2011-07-19, 03:26 PM
Whatever your views on innate gender differences, I would say that for beginners it's best to downplay the differences as much as possible. Mainly because the primary error I've seen in new players is that they overplay differences to where they take over the character. Whereas generally going in the other direction manages to work fairly well - particularly since, if anything, the kind of characters played aren't stereotypical members of their sex (at least for men playing female characters).

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-19, 03:34 PM
In online gaming, the more a character stresses over their femininity or being a woman the more likely the player is to have dangly parts in my experience.

I'm also willing to admit that most of the females I've played with tended to make pretty violent characters that cared more about defeating others, finding out new and exciting ways to pull out entrails, or ways to mindcrush people into being their minions.

And I still say that if all there is to your character is their reaction to gender roles, it's going to be pretty boring. Add more to the PC then just their gender. Gender, or sex, alone does not make for a character.

kyoryu
2011-07-19, 03:55 PM
That said, I have had a male player play a female sorceress who used sex to get what she wanted when she could. And it worked. Quite well. We all loved that character.

I see what you did there.

:smallbiggrin:

WarKitty
2011-07-19, 04:01 PM
I see what you did there.

:smallbiggrin:

Heh. That wasn't even intentional.

Ravens_cry
2011-07-19, 04:13 PM
In online gaming, the more a character stresses over their femininity or being a woman the more likely the player is to have dangly parts in my experience.

I'm also willing to admit that most of the females I've played with tended to make pretty violent characters that cared more about defeating others, finding out new and exciting ways to pull out entrails, or ways to mindcrush people into being their minions.

And I still say that if all there is to your character is their reaction to gender roles, it's going to be pretty boring. Add more to the PC then just their gender. Gender, or sex, alone does not make for a character.
I don't think many (any?) are implying it does. Gender is kind of like broth in a soup. You can have a lot of other ingredients in a soup, many of whom can almost completely overwhelm the flavour of the broth. Depending on the strength of the broth, some can in fact do so. But they are all soups and they are all good.

GoblinArchmage
2011-07-19, 04:14 PM
All in all, humans are humans. It's not remarkably more difficult to get inside the head of a woman than it is to relate to a person of your own sex that's from a foreign culture. It's a matter of practice, really.

This.

Yes, a woman and a man will be different, but that's because they are two different people. Those who are stressing the "inherent" differences between the sexes are, unintentionally, implying generalizations about women and men. Making comparisons like that doesn't make sense, because neither women nor men are homogeneous.

Yanagi
2011-07-19, 05:15 PM
Well, here's the problem to my eyes: there is an utter, complete, and fundamental difference in the entire life, social raising, economic balance, societal interaction, acceptable mores and mindset, and group think attributed personality development between the two genders.

Culture affects preception of appropriate roles and tasks according to gender, but in "real life" there's actually a lot of variance in gender roles cross-culturally. Raising, economics, interactions, mores, mindset--none of these things are consistent across the globe such that one could generate a meaningful model of "male" versus "female" on a universal scale [Note: the one pattern that does emerge is how pregnancy and nursing affect domestic economy and labor; in societies where birth control and/or child care is available, this pattern deteriorates].

Gender is socialized: the individual establishes their sense of gendered identity via amalgamation of impressions of the actions and thoughts of people around them, weighted by proximics. There's at least seventy years of anthropological research that specifically addresses the ways in which different people in different places at different times define gender and gender roles differently.


Even if there were no pyschiatric differences (which science indicates there definitively are, based on chemicals, physiology, neural "wiring", and more), the societal differences and the resultant development of character and personality inherently mean that there is a huge barrier to overcome...and that would be in our own, reasonably egalitarian world.

Well, the psychiatric differences don't really sync consistently across testing models--particularly cross-culturally--and the discerned neurological differences that have been confirmed deal more with perception-based tasks like 3-D modelling than with behavioral traits. Even the basic "testosterone versus estrogen distinction" really isn't gender, as both males and females experience variance not only person to person, but within a lifetime.

Furthermore, all evidence in D&D fantasy worlds point to their being greater, not less, social equality. Patriarchal structures in described cultures are far less common and assigned/appropriate gender roles certainly aren't perpetuated in rosters of NPCs.


There are outliers, but its pretty indictive that something, physical or societal, has a shaping effect that means genders are NOT as easy as "play an elf."

It's indicative that we learn from an early age that one behaves as a "boy" or "girl" or there's punishment--mockery, ostracism, correction. Not a lot of people have an entrenched sense of proper "elf-ness" that they're directing their kids to follow or challenge their peers about.


And, as someone pointed out, while you can play "long eared human with minor differences" elf because inherently we revert to human basic as reasonable seeming RP, if you play the opposite gender your likely to end up as one of the following (they are male perspectives given the majoity male involvement in the hobby):

Man with boobs. Acts like a man, talks like a man, views the world through the lense of a man, occassionally inserts something womanly when it will have minimal consequence. Only brings out the female portion as a a class feature (usually for social situations and gaining access to places) At this point...why not just play a man, and spend the effort on developing the character rather than making gender the pony? Of course, if the point is to fill a party role niche (we need a female because they access to things females can), go for it.

You're appealing to essentialism: that "man-ness' is something clear-cut and distinct from "woman-ness," yet defining neither.


Not to say it shouldn't be done, just that it will probably be very difficult to feel authentic. Even more so than an elf. Because you can be forced to think "how would an elf view this", but for most gender related roles, the way you think about things is as unthinking as breathing. You just do.

Gender is socialized, and just because it's driven in with great intensity at an early age doesn't mean it's unthinking or impossible to replicate. Indeed, one of the things studied in developmental psych is social monitoring of acceptable gender performance--first from parents, then from peers--and it's a very explicit and cognitive process. Start with pink versus blue baby clothes and proceed forward--even as adults there is a social punishment/reward process for having gender in-/appropriate interests that is occuring continuously.

Personality and conduct exist as a dialectal tension between societal expectations and personal drives. To play an opposite gender (and as a DM, I do this a lot), you have to imagine the society that brought up the woman/man you're pretending to be, then ascertain their personal reaction to those social models of said society regarding men/women. Basically, you figure out a very simple sketch of what manly/womanly is supposed to be in the culture, the family, et cetera...then figure out how the individual PC/NPC feels about being defined by those criterion.

But probably the single most important thing to remember is that there's more variance between individuals in personality traits than there is between the genders (or races, or species, etc).

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-19, 05:26 PM
That's what I'm arguing isn't true though. Take into account absolutely all differences and you'll still be virtually unable to determine the differences between men and women based on their personalities and perception of the world. The only topic they have any serious divergence of opinion on at all is gender.

I've seen several studies that suggest otherwise. But if looking just at prefences in sexual and romantic partners, I'd say you'd have better than 50% chance to determine sex correctly. (This based on statistics I've seen on the ubiquity of homosexuals; homosexual women make up between 1 to 5 percent of all women, and homosexual men between 10 to 20 percent of all men.) So you can't really discount that major difference, even if it's the "only" one.


Alternately, I guess I could ask, just what do you think a female character should do to differentiate herself from a male character? Why would they act significantly differently in the same situations and scenarios?

You are ignoring the fact that change in sex constitues a change in the situation, sometimes considerably. For example, settling down and having kids are very different proposals if for men and a women. The man has, both psychologically and physically, much easier time to bail if he gets second thoughts.


Whatever your views on innate gender differences, I would say that for beginners it's best to downplay the differences as much as possible. Mainly because the primary error I've seen in new players is that they overplay differences to where they take over the character. Whereas generally going in the other direction manages to work fairly well - particularly since, if anything, the kind of characters played aren't stereotypical members of their sex (at least for men playing female characters).

This is very true. Exaggeration tends to draw attention to the fact that you are "fake". Sublety makes for a more realistic portrayal.

Katana_Geldar
2011-07-19, 05:53 PM
I do this all the time as DM, but not sure if I would do it as a character.

I can say that in my group, a guy plays as a girl and a girl plays as a guy in our 3.5 game, which really screws with the DMs head when they flirt with each other.

MlleRouge
2011-07-19, 06:04 PM
I almost always play male characters. This may have something to do with my own gender identity, but it also has to do with writing.

I was once scolded rather bitterly by a freeform RPer on another site for playing a male character. According to him, it was 'unnatural' and 'gross'. Since it was freeform role playing, therefore basically just writing, I responded by telling him that he was either a bad writer (after all, most good novels have characters of both sexes) or he was way too hung up on gender roles and the idea that RPing = playing yourself.

Several people have mentioned gender roles. Most of the time I meet someone who has trouble dealing with an opposite sex character, that's part of it. It's not that the player has any bias, but they're either worried about being embarrassed or are conditioned to be uncomfortable because 'men/women are different' or 'its not manly/ladylike'. My usual advice goes back to what I said to the guy: treat it like writing.

When you make a new character that's notably different from yourself, you have to consider those differences. Social status, upbringing, emotional state, etc. That goes without saying. Making an opposite sex character is no different. It just adds one more thing to consider, and that's the character's sex (and possibly gender identity, sexuality, etc...depending on the kind of character you're making).

...And by this point I'm rambling and can't even be sure that I've added much new material to the conversation :smallredface: I apologize, this is the sort of thing that comes up often IRL for me, and it's something I enjoy talking about.

But anyhow, if you want to go for it, just go for it. Treat it like any other character that differs from yourself and have fun with it.

Yukitsu
2011-07-19, 06:28 PM
I've seen several studies that suggest otherwise. But if looking just at prefences in sexual and romantic partners, I'd say you'd have better than 50% chance to determine sex correctly. (This based on statistics I've seen on the ubiquity of homosexuals; homosexual women make up between 1 to 5 percent of all women, and homosexual men between 10 to 20 percent of all men.) So you can't really discount that major difference, even if it's the "only" one.

Yes, the mentioned factors are about gender roles, which does diverge. But generally, those don't come up in a campaign, or when they do, it is irritating and grating when it's the focus.


You are ignoring the fact that change in sex constitues a change in the situation, sometimes considerably. For example, settling down and having kids are very different proposals if for men and a women. The man has, both psychologically and physically, much easier time to bail if he gets second thoughts.

I'm not ignoring that. That is, again a perception based around a question of gender roles, which they do view things differently about. Getting by that, and assuming that "adventurer" is a legitimate female role in society, the question doesn't really come up otherwise, and one shouldn't play them differently in the campaign. Unless you're proposing that the campaign involve starting a family and settling down, though that's really far from the norm.

Ravens_cry
2011-07-19, 06:36 PM
I do this all the time as DM, but not sure if I would do it as a character.

I can say that in my group, a guy plays as a girl and a girl plays as a guy in our 3.5 game, which really screws with the DMs head when they flirt with each other.
I think a mature, experienced, DM can handle it. I had a character develop a relationship and eventually marry a member of a different species (and no, I don't mean elf, or even dwarf) with the DM being not the gender of the NPC, and I think they handled it very well, in a mature and well thought out way.

Knaight
2011-07-19, 06:42 PM
Put another way: why do you think the majority of this board is male if males and females think and act the same, enough to the point where switching is easy? There are outliers, but its pretty indictive that something, physical or societal, has a shaping effect that means genders are NOT as easy as "play an elf."


Sure, but its not as if plenty of other massive changes to characters aren't made. I'm not an impoverished serf, and the difference between myself and my comfortable life and the life of an impoverished serf with no rights is going to be much bigger than the difference between just male and female. Similarly, I'm not an incredibly rich and powerful noble with a bunch of servants I can order around, with a huge amount of local fame, which is again a larger difference than gender.

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-19, 06:46 PM
Also, I wonder how large of a majority men have over women on these boards. I'm in a play by post game where people accidentally called the female player a dude. She took it in stride, but I would not be surprised if many people assumed posters were male when they aren't.

flumphy
2011-07-19, 07:36 PM
While I'm not denying that there are psychological differences (even if those are only cultural), the reality is that most are too nuanced for the average roleplayer to pick up on, especially in media like play-by-post where physical cues from the player don't factor in.

Honestly, over the internet, I would argue that they don't factor in much in real life. In MMOs and message boards, I have interacted with people for months without indicating my gender. Not concealing it in any way, just not bringing it up unless it was relevant. And always, when it has come up, people have been shocked that I am female. People who I had spent two hours a night with for the previous two months.

A good writer can create believable characters of either gender, as can a good DM. I see no reason why players should not attempt to do so as well. The key word being "believable." If you're the stereotypical 300 pound man pretending to be the seductive woman for the sole purpose of sleeping with everything that moves in an otherwise serious campaign, you might want to rethink that.

Hierarchy9990
2011-07-19, 09:31 PM
Wow.. I honestly didn't think this thread would get much attention. I think I understand how it works now. But please don't let this discourage anyone from posting, this is making for a pretty interesting read. Also thanks for all your inputs so far. I appreciate it.



I almost always play male characters. This may have something to do with my own gender identity, but it also has to do with writing.

I was once scolded rather bitterly by a freeform RPer on another site for playing a male character. According to him, it was 'unnatural' and 'gross'. Since it was freeform role playing, therefore basically just writing, I responded by telling him that he was either a bad writer (after all, most good novels have characters of both sexes) or he was way too hung up on gender roles and the idea that RPing = playing yourself.

Several people have mentioned gender roles. Most of the time I meet someone who has trouble dealing with an opposite sex character, that's part of it. It's not that the player has any bias, but they're either worried about being embarrassed or are conditioned to be uncomfortable because 'men/women are different' or 'its not manly/ladylike'. My usual advice goes back to what I said to the guy: treat it like writing.

When you make a new character that's notably different from yourself, you have to consider those differences. Social status, upbringing, emotional state, etc. That goes without saying. Making an opposite sex character is no different. It just adds one more thing to consider, and that's the character's sex (and possibly gender identity, sexuality, etc...depending on the kind of character you're making).

...And by this point I'm rambling and can't even be sure that I've added much new material to the conversation :smallredface: I apologize, this is the sort of thing that comes up often IRL for me, and it's something I enjoy talking about.

But anyhow, if you want to go for it, just go for it. Treat it like any other character that differs from yourself and have fun with it.

Hey its cool to talk about that stuff sometimes, especially when its relevant to the thread. I may try the whole playing a girl thing in the future as an experimental thing, but I kind of enjoy playing as a male I was mostly just curious on how other people do it. Mostly because some of them do it so well. :smallwink:

Kalirren
2011-07-20, 01:10 AM
Wow.. I honestly didn't think this thread would get much attention. I think I understand how it works now. But please don't let this discourage anyone from posting, this is making for a pretty interesting read. Also thanks for all your inputs so far. I appreciate it.

Heh; it's a hot-button topic. It's a hot-button topic because people are opinionated about this. It's already starting to degenerate into the usual bickering about the nature and extent of the differences between males and females, men and women. I suspect people are unwilling to give ground because their own ways of dealing with their own sex and gender iRL are made manifest in the positions they take on the issue of the gender and sex differences, and these are all as varied, as particular, and as subjectively true as the sexualities under the sun.

In the end it fundamentally doesn't matter what gender or sex differences there actually -are-. Arguing that that someone else is misportraying their character (as opposed to complaning that person is portraying an uninteresting character) reveals the presence of a stereotype concept on part of the person offering that argument and neglects the player's agency in defining their character. It may not even be the canonical stereotype; indeed there are plenty of strong anti-stereotypical sterotypes. In the end, only the player really knows why they make the RP decisions they do. Although I could imagine it happening quite easily, I've never actually had an OOC player conflict arise from the portrayal of a character that was perceived to be too much of or not enough of a stereotype. This leads me to believe it's not a very common issue, so game on.

rayne_dragon
2011-07-20, 01:23 AM
The greatest stumbling block I've encountered is if the group will always refer to the character by your gender even if they are not the same (sometimes even after you're corrected them several times :smallannoyed:), but that's a problem with the group in that case and in my experience usually indicative of a group that doesn't really care about the whole 'playing a character' part of roleplaying.

Oddy, we had the opposite problem with one of my groups. A male character played by a man was almost constantly refered to as "she," including by the player himself. It became a joke that it was because "you can never tell with elves."

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-20, 01:29 AM
Lemme guess, ambiguous artwork? I MIGHT have initially thought Corellon was a chick due to this when I first played DnD.

WarKitty
2011-07-20, 01:30 AM
I suspect that generally, the type of player that causes problems is not the one that's concerned about playing the character appropriately. Generally the problem player is the one who shows up with a female character because "Hey lesbians are hot!"

Hiro Protagonest
2011-07-20, 01:35 AM
Lemme guess, ambiguous artwork? I MIGHT have initially thought Corellon was a chick due to this when I first played DnD.

I think Corellon is drawn to look androgynous. I think his description in Deities and Demigods said he was androgynous looking (can't look it up right now).

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-20, 01:37 AM
He is described that way, but I didn't get a look at the text when spying over someone's shoulders. It fits the god, but you do need to read the text.

Poil
2011-07-20, 05:45 AM
Personally I find that some characters I think up just plain work better as women. I can't explain it, it's just a feeling. To be fair I'm not good at roleplaying women but I can't roleplay well in general anyway. I'd guess that between a third or half of my characters have been female. My current Shadowrun character is even female and black but that's another can of worms.

KineticDiplomat
2011-07-20, 07:25 AM
Re: The differences between a lordling, a peasant, and a you are much harder to imagine than a gender difference:

I would disagree. That is merely a measure of power and influence. Most of us have some experience with power hierarchies based on wealth, personality, or position. We have, for the most part, been closer to the top or bottom of assorted networks and hierarchies in our lives. There is a basis to work from. Its not a perfect transferrance by any means, but we understand the concept through personal experience. We have, for the most part, been in charge of people and been under people. We have had time at the bottom of the ladder of some group, and closer to the top of another. You might say that almost any society you've been in has shaped you to understand hierarchies of power. From there its a matter of extrapolation.

In contrast, the average player has absolutely zero experience being the opposite gender. I'm sure there are exceptions, but a fair assumption is that the vast majority have not. There is no baseline to work from. As such, players have to pull from second hand reflections at best for their baseline. Substantially more difficult.

Which segues nicely into "but we play lizardmen and immortal dryads on nothing more than a few pages of culture description, or maybe just a quick paragraph in the player races chapter - if we can do that, cross gender should be easy."

As one poster pointed out, we have not particularly drilled into our minds a category of "elf-ness" to be followed beyond whatever the setting fluff indicates. Nor does anyone, anywhere, to the best of my knowledge, have anything other than educated guesses (informed by the setting) at what being an elf is like. So, you can run with it. And, at the end of the day if you act like a human with a scaly skin and some inferred societal personality traits, it may not be the best character you ever played but it will still feel reasonable. And, at the end of the day, there is very little to make an attempt feel "not quite right" on these.

With gender, as was also pointed out by Yanagi, every culture clearly ends up defining gender roles and applying immense shaping pressures to conform the population at large to those images. Also in complete concurrence with Yanagi, the economic and technological level of the culture in question goes a long way to determining what those are. And we, as products of such a society, have a distinct view of what male and female are. There is much more to live up to, and many more nuances to simulate, than a few paragraphs on how the lizardkin worship sunny rocks or some such. Of course, we automatically seem to assume that reproduction works human-standard in those societies as well...

As to essentialism: yes, to a certain point I am. Unfortunately, any attempt to lay down a definition is going to be riddled with either "thats sexist" , "well, Anecdote X flies in the face of", or "but there are exceptions by personality." Which, while doubtless true, are also largely irrelevant. Every ounce of real world experience we have, which is indeed defined by society and pyschology, indicates that women and men act in distinctly different manners in social and professional situations. Without making this diatribe even longer, I think we can all identify how we would expect to see an average member of the opposite gender and our own gender acting in a bar or a birthday party.

Another fun real world question to answer in context: why are there less women in academia than men? Rule out the blatantly stupid answers about who is dumber or smarter, and assume that thanks to our society that the middle class and above have reasonably equal opportunities to pursue that path, and your left with trying to explain the same reasons why cross-gender roleplay requires more effort, for less effects, than the alternatives.

In short, yes, you can play cross gender. But the combination of absolute lack of personal experience corresponding with vast amounts of percpetion shaping as a product of daily life makes it much, much, harder to get away with than something you either have some experience with OR there is no real "standard" for across the population at large.

kamikasei
2011-07-20, 08:25 AM
OP: the single point I'd most emphasize is that a character's sex will influence how they were treated growing up, what was expected of them, what behaviours were encouraged or discouraged, etc. This will depend on the setting you're playing in, so it pays to ensure you're on the same page as your GM and group in that regard. And then the second point is that, depending on the game, there's an excellent chance that you're way out on the fringes of abnormality within society anyway and half of society's norms may not apply to you in any case.

I'm going to disagree on this one. Roleplaying is not a visual medium, so playing another gender just "for the looks" makes no sense.
Sure it does. I generally have a clear image in my mind of what my character looks like. Sometimes I have a lot of that image before I begin making the character at all - it's the first bit of inspiration when I'm creating the character, just as other times the starting point is a backstory element, or an arc within the game, or a mechanical concept. If that image is female, so's the character.

Without making this diatribe even longer, I think we can all identify how we would expect to see an average member of the opposite gender and our own gender acting in a bar or a birthday party.
An "average member" is of little relevance to any individual character. That's why your argument would be identified as sexist as you expect: it acts as though the fact that a group has a mean or mode means that someone differing from that is somehow failing at being who they are.

I find it baffling how you can reference Yanagi's points about the influence of society on gendered behaviour and completely ignore the point in the same post that such influence pushes in different directions in different societies. That... doesn't really square with essentialism, to put it mildly.

Not to mention that, as MlleRouge pointed out, these arguments would suggest that no author could ever write characters of other genders convincingly, and thus they fail immediately. Yes - when a character's sex differs from yours, that'll mean their experience differed and differs in ways that you should take in to account when thinking about their backstory, development, and psychology, and you may even want to do some research on the topic to better understand those differences. This is not overwhelmingly more true for sex than for other traits, whatever you may assert. Nor are male and female psyches so alien to one another that someone with normal human empathy and family, friends and role models of other genders cannot reasonably answer the question "what would X do?" for relevant values of X.

Mary Leathert
2011-07-20, 08:50 AM
Well, in our group (we play Call of C'thulhu), the roleplaying has never been that strong, it's more about solving the mysteries (and getting killed in unfortunate ways :smalltongue:). Because of this I have never found it difficult to play a male. It might have helped that we started playing the standard 20s era, and it might have been a bit unlikely that there was a female detective running around. My current character is also a male even though our game takes place in the 80s, and so is one other female player's. Maybe I'm just generally interested in issues about gender, and wanted to try playing a male, even though it hasn't had any huge impact on how I play.

In general, I don't think that gender is the first an foremost defining aspect of any human. It's one difference among others, and might find more in common with let's say male students of your age than older retired women. Or women living in a refugee camp.
Besides this, I'd like to think that most of the difference between genders comes from society and history, not from something inherent. Just because men and women at this point in history react differently to things/act differently in different situations, doesn't mean that it should always be that way. You cannot derive how things should be from how they are now, or have been in the past.

(It might show that I'm minoring in Gender Studies :smallwink:).

Lord_Gareth
2011-07-20, 08:59 AM
I honestly roleplay women more than I roleplay men, and I have no idea why I do it (I'm not transgender, I don't have any repressed homosexuality [self-admitted bi-curiosity, yes, but, y'know, self-admitted = not repressed]). At first, I wasn't convincing at all, and it really kinda showed, but I started talking to women about women and got a lot of good advice. Here's some I'll give you if you're looking to represent the opposite sex:

- If you're doing it IRL, be prepared for a long, uphill battle to be taken seriously. It may help if the DM can be brought "onto your side" in terms of getting the NPCs and setting to react to you as appropriate for the culture(s) you choose to adventure in, even if it's inconvenient. I remember running an epic-level paladin once (sue me, it was seven years ago) who walked into a culture where women were legally property with rights, kinda like in the Nadrak culture of The Belgariad. No one else really took the 'woman' thing seriously until the DM really played up the reactions of this totally different nation to her, even though she was a renowned warrior and champion of justice.

- If you're doing it online, resist the urge to post in 'girly' colors unless they really, truly, deeply fit the character. Try finding another way of marking your posts or dialogue, like using italics or figuring out your character's personal accents or idioms (are they from Philly? Look up some slang. Do people from the Free City of Kralis speak in WWI English naval slang? Use some!). Likewise, again, unless it fits the character it's probably best to try and avoid "Gender War" topics like fashion vs. handiness (fun fact: I know more girls that are good at 'handyman' stuff than I do guys) or military service or whatever, because no matter how seriously you take it all it's going to do is sound preachy or strawman unless you really, deeply manage to sell the character.

- Remember that gender and gender identity are a defining aspect of a character, but not the defining aspect. It'll be important to some characters and completely irrelevant to others, and sometimes not in ways you'd expect. I once ran a living construct that had a vaguely male aspect that kept growing stronger with time, until a druid quietly asked him why he thought of himself as male. It blew his clockwork mind and made him completely re-evaluate what he thought of living beings. On the inverse side, my paladin from the above example never really thought about her gender or sexuality much; the violence of her upbringing and her day-to-day life was more important, more relevant, than the question of if she was 'feminine enough' (and when other folks made it an issue, she typically ignored them. Unless she was drunk, then she nonlethal'd them into next week).

- I'm going to echo above advice - play a character, not a stereotype. These things evolve naturally. If you're really interested in representing someone of the opposite gender for whom gender matters or is a relevant theme in their characterization, I'd highly suggest finding some of your friends of that gender and having a frank discussion with them on what it's really like to be them, you know? You may even be surprised.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 09:08 AM
I propose we could use following definitions:

Traits that are more common in men are masculine.
Traits that are more common in women are feminine.
Traits that appear equally often in both are neutral.

These can be derived from statistical analysis of large enough sample population. (These kinds of studies are dime a dozen.) So the reference points were using are "the average man" and "the average woman".

If you're in any way familiar with studies like that, you've likely noticed that average people are pretty stereotypical. It's better to not get hung up on this. As I said before, real people are rarely average. Averages and stereotypes both stem from real observations, but as a sum of different observations you'll be hard-pressed to find any single sample case that fits the average mold.

(To use a RPG example, 3d6 roll has a mean of 10,5. When using this roll to determine base abilities of a character, you can think the average person has all 10s and 11s as stats. But when actually rolling, you are very unlikely to get those results. Majority of possible characters actually have a statline consisting of anything but 10s or 11s.)

From these premises, you end up with a grid roughly like this:

http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/9717/genderg.jpg

Possibly we could use two grids, one for physical and second for psychological profile, to acknowledge and handle potential disparity between self-image and body.

kamikasei
2011-07-20, 09:29 AM
I propose we could use following definitions:
...to do what?

Yes, you can take any population and find things that correlate with this attribute or that; but in this case, what's the purpose of doing so?

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 09:44 AM
To clarify the discussion; talk about stereotypical or average people people becomes easier when it's defined what they actually are. It creates a framework to examine different characters and advice in.

kamikasei
2011-07-20, 10:09 AM
I'd say those terms and ideas are so inherently confused it's more useful to discard them than to try to redefine them, if clarity is the goal. Easier for people to state clearly what they mean than try to puzzle out whether they're using those terms as you defined them - whether they intend to, and whether they've understood you correctly. After all, once defined narrowly enough to have definite meanings the terms no longer cover a whole raft of their current uses, which we'll need other ways to discuss in any case.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 10:43 AM
What ideas? Femininity and masculinity? Stereotypes of either? I disagree that discarding any of those will make the discussion easier. (If anything, it makes it impossible to discuss some facets of the issue.)

In my mind, they are confused precisly because they aren't defined narrowly enough. You may be right that if defined too narrowly, they lose applicability, but they do as much if defined too broadly.

Starbuck_II
2011-07-20, 11:12 AM
Hi I'm new here, and I was just wanted to ask this of the players who like to role play as the opposite gender. How do you do it? To me role playing as the other sex is a pretty difficult task, and I find it pretty cool how some people can pull it off without it becoming cliche or sexist. I've tried it couple of times(in video games), and when I play a girl it always just feels.. Uncomfortable.

I guess I just need a way to associate with my characters, and playing as a girl feels too alien to me. But I know there's a lot of people can pull it off so if there is anyone here guy or girl who enjoys role playing like this, please post. I'm interested to hear how you do it.

I think the idea that one can roleplay a gender cliche or sexist is silly.
So what if they have an issue with your method: that is just them being sexist. Women can be as smart or stupid as men (and as horny or chaste as men).

So don't restrict yourself by what you perceve a women would be and just be.

kamikasei
2011-07-20, 11:13 AM
Yes, I'm talking about the terms "masculinity" and "femininity" and the confused mess of ideas they represent.

In short, I think it's better to try to be clear about what unconfused things that fall under the umbrella of those terms we mean at any given time, than to try to narrow the terms to cover just one of them. For one thing, if we pick one thing for the terms to mean we still have to find ways to discuss the things we've excised. For another, it creates confusion as to who's using what meaning; it's something that can work in an essay by a single speaker, but it's not good in discussion.

At more length: these terms are bad, through and through. The whole point of them is the confusion of ideas they embody: of "this is how men/women are" with "this is how men/women should be", of "these are the results of a statistical analysis of a population" with "these are the stereotypes prevalent in the popular consciousness", of "these are things that correlate with being male/female, however we're identifying that, in a particular context" with "these are universal truths we can use to identify someone as male/female". They are junk notions that do real harm. I think it's a better approach to think clearly and then make the effort to speak clearly about the issues they confuse, using other language, than to keep using the same language in a different way and provide cover to continued confused thinking.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 11:38 AM
These terms are bad, through and through. The whole point of them is the confusion of ideas they embody.

... which is exactly why I think we should clear the confusion by agreeing on set things what they're supposed to embody. If we scrap them, then we need to come up with some other terminology to discuss the same thing, which is the exact same problem you said defining them would cause.


They are junk notions that do real harm. I think it's a better approach to think clearly and then make the effort to speak clearly about the issues they confuse, using other language, than to keep using the same language in a different way and provide cover to continued confused thinking.

What language would you propose is clearer, then?

WarKitty
2011-07-20, 12:33 PM
I think what frozen is trying to say is that, while there are attributes that more men display and attributes that more women display, any given man or woman will not display all those attributes. For example, a female fighter is unlikely to be overly concerned about her appearance, whereas a male bard might be quite vain.

Kalirren
2011-07-20, 12:48 PM
Rushing in and defining loaded terms is a sure way to make a very limited amount of progress.

Let's start with things that are apparent.

There's sex, which is a biological phenomenon.

Then there's sexuality, which is the personal and social expression of sex.

Then there's gender, which is a socially constructed phenomenon fundamentally distinct from sex, though trivially often dependent on it. Gender is a set of social conventions that people use to express their sexuality. If sexuality is speech, the elements of gender are its social vocabulary.

From gender we get masculinity, which is a set of expectations of gender that are associated with the male sex constructed by society at large, and similarly, femininity, a set of socially constructed expectations of gender associated with the female sex.

Immediately a flaw in Frozen's proposed definitions becomes apparent; in defining masculinity as the set of traits -exhibited- by men, as opposed to those -expected- to be exhibited by men, you're assuming that society is Platonically accurate in its expectations, which is an obviously false assumption to make. Not making this mistake opens up (among others) the meaningful questions of how and to what extent both men and women use both masculine and feminine behavior, indeed both masculinity and femininity themselves, to express their individual sexuality.

KineticDiplomat
2011-07-20, 01:20 PM
Well, in the interests of defining masculinity and feminity, as well as defending certain essentialisms, can we agree on the following for our further discussion? We can't very well say there is no such thing as a masculine or feminien trait after we've gone to great lengths to point out that society naturally shapes those traits...as does physiology, but since the citing wars would become bickering, we'll call it minor enough to ignore for now. Even if they are societally imposed, a few might include (others are welcome to help round out the discussion):

Masculine Traits

-Typically the social aggressor. With a few outliers on the bell curve, almost all societies have some form of the male putting in effort to gain access to females. Granted, it looks very different depending on the society. The universal example is whoring - the supply/demand curve, natural or artificially regulated, obviously supports and has historically supported, that accesss to sex is something men work to gain, with the reverse being that women do not typically have to do so.

-Typically associated with direct conflict, and more likely to resort to it. A throwback to meat-powered days, but still prevalent. For fantasy worlds which are still meat-powered, possibly more likely?

-Typically more loyal to organizations than to individuals. Yes, studies back it.

-Typically less associated with the household workings, especially in lower technology/economy societies.

-Typically have much less socially acceptable movement toward feminine modes than vice versa.

-Typically have more of a cultural sense of worth built around dominance, toughness, and ambition. In the assorted countries 1st world, 3rd world, and in between world that I've ever gone to "you're a girl/pansy/<insert local name for female genitalia>" implied less aggression, tougness, or willingness to accept risk.

-Typically more pressured to chase sex, typically more accepted societally to act on sexual impulses. Whether its victorian England, ancient greece, or modern day Japan the cards almost always come down on this one.

...feel free to add. I have not started to define feminine traits because I'm sure the above will create enough discussion.

Qaera
2011-07-20, 01:33 PM
I'd say I play about 50/50. My longest living character has been a female elan Psion, Luna, and I've had loads of fun with her. She was bald (+3 CHA while bald, tattoo) and that was very... interesting. Most people only think of the bald males! But clocking in at the high 20's of CHA had her turning heads. During one mission, we had to go through the Trials, one of which was suffering at the hands of devils. That was an interesting bit.

I also had Seventeen, a monk, who was probably my second longest lived. He was pretty deep, and several times had to explore what it meant for him to be a man (he ended up sacrificing his genitals to his god, I think, in exchange for a better heart for a teammate). After that, he mellowed out a bit with the fighting (I think we crunched it as Vow of Peace).

Also, if you meant opposite gender in the title, well, that doesn't really apply to me. :smallwink:

~ ♅

Knaight
2011-07-20, 01:56 PM
Re: The differences between a lordling, a peasant, and a you are much harder to imagine than a gender difference:

I would disagree. That is merely a measure of power and influence. Most of us have some experience with power hierarchies based on wealth, personality, or position. We have, for the most part, been closer to the top or bottom of assorted networks and hierarchies in our lives. There is a basis to work from. Its not a perfect transferrance by any means, but we understand the concept through personal experience. We have, for the most part, been in charge of people and been under people. We have had time at the bottom of the ladder of some group, and closer to the top of another. You might say that almost any society you've been in has shaped you to understand hierarchies of power. From there its a matter of extrapolation.

Power and influence are only the tip of the iceberg. Sure, most people have been up and down hierarchies, but consider, for instance, food. A peasant is always dealing with the threat of starvation, and may well have been near starvation before. There are certainly people who are familiar with that who role play, but for those who haven't that is pretty major. Its an intellectual concept, understood through second hand accounts at best. Moreover, in affluent societies most people are familiar with more people of the opposite gender than people dealing with vastly poorer or vastly superior living conditions. These characters can still be convincingly written, and if they can be convincingly written they can be convincingly played.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 02:02 PM
I think what frozen is trying to say is that, while there are attributes that more men display and attributes that more women display, any given man or woman will not display all those attributes. For example, a female fighter is unlikely to be overly concerned about her appearance, whereas a male bard might be quite vain.

Essentially, yes. I also tried to illustrate with that picture I made that it would be possible for a character to exhibit traits typical to both genders, or lack gender-typical behaviour alltogether. My point is that while we can use stereotypical average man and average as reference points, most people will not map to the four extreme corners of the grid, but somewhere in between.



Immediately a flaw in Frozen's proposed definitions becomes apparent; in defining masculinity as the set of traits -exhibited- by men, as opposed to those -expected- to be exhibited by men, you're assuming that society is Platonically accurate in its expectations, which is an obviously false assumption to make.

Uh, no. If anything, I tried to convey the exact opposite: we can compare real people to stereotypes, but it's very rare for people to fit the stereotypes. With sufficiently large sample population to determine the stereotypical averages, the division between what behaviours men exhibit and what they're -expected- to exhibit should become semantic, as there isn't a society to determine that in the first place.


Not making this mistake opens up (among others) the meaningful questions of how and to what extent both men and women use both masculine and feminine behavior, indeed both masculinity and femininity themselves, to express their individual sexuality.

I thought I made it apparent in the illustration that I consider people to be able to be both, or even neither. I even included a paragraph of using two grids to model people who's gender is divorced from their physical sex. :smallconfused:

KineticDiplomat
2011-07-20, 03:17 PM
I will concede to Knaight that the modern western roleplayer, who obviously has enough spare productive time to buy games and play them, probably is not familiar with subistence level living in the medieval serf or modern Bangladehs shanty town sense.

Of course, its very rare that that sort of thing actually gets rolepayed. Typically the farthest concession is making players carry rations to prevent them from conducting mountaintop ultra marathons on nothing more than their boots and a magic sword. A couple post-apocalytpic types might force factor it in just to give that feel of scraping.

Even then, it would be rarer still for the true effects of hunger or fatigue to be roleplayed...granted, largely in part because we don't like our action heroes to be slowed too much unless they have a spear through the eye...but also because they are fairly alien to people.

When was the last time your PC started making awful decisions because he was sleep deprived? Dropped into a drone and zone mode where the three hours of sleep and half meal she has had daily for the last three weeks has reduced her to little more than mindlessly trying to drudge out the miles, not thinking, not caring, just going because they have to go? Not giving two ****s about the bandits, because right now sleep and a sandwhich mean more than some random employer?

I'm not talking "-2 STR, -2 CON, -2 INT..." I'm talking legitimately having sleep and food be the center of that character's world until they can get some?Probably not often.

And if we roleplay hunger that poorly because we have little experience with it beyond misisng lunch or maybe pulling a long night of work, or its inconvenient, how much harder to roleplay something we have no frame of reference for whatsoever, namely being an entirely different gender?

As always, not saying it shouldn't be done. Just pointing out, that as Gareth has observed, doing it convincingly is incredibly difficult to get right as opposed to working within a framework at least that we have some tangential experience to.

Lamech
2011-07-20, 03:50 PM
And if we roleplay hunger that poorly because we have little experience with it beyond misisng lunch or maybe pulling a long night of work, or its inconvenient, how much harder to roleplay something we have no frame of reference for whatsoever, namely being an entirely different gender?
... Okay, look your arguing that it is impossible to correctly roleplay a different gender? Hmm... well its really to bad we can't test this assumption. No, wait yes we can. If the two genders are so different that one would have trouble acting like the other, it would be fairly quickly obvious to many who is male and who is female over internet boards such as these.
So a female player would not be mistaken for a male and visa versa. If a female was mistaken for a male, then that female is acting like a male, and therefore a male could simply act like a male, and then act like that female. And again visa versa.
So this is easy to test, if we have a person who frequently is mistaken for a different gender then roleplaying the opposite gender is no trouble at all!


Honestly, over the internet, I would argue that they don't factor in much in real life. In MMOs and message boards, I have interacted with people for months without indicating my gender. Not concealing it in any way, just not bringing it up unless it was relevant. And always, when it has come up, people have been shocked that I am female. People who I had spent two hours a night with for the previous two months. Aww... look at that. A perfect counter example to the belief, "males act differently then females." Yes flumphy is probably not average, but that is fine. RPG characters are far from average.

Mono Vertigo
2011-07-20, 03:53 PM
I've been also mistaken as a guy in the past, which is why I've put the nice little gender symbol under my avatar. So I wouldn't have to correct people every once in a while. I doubt I'm average either, but past a point, who is? :smallwink:

Werekat
2011-07-20, 04:14 PM
I play men about 50% of the time, and have no problem with it. Mostly because I pay attention to the men in my life, and watch what they do, and how it differs from the way women work. The differences really are there, but for me modelling them comes down to a few useful rules:

- The physical differences are downplayed in most RP. Take advantage of that: you can ignore those factors pretty safely;
- start building from the culture. Admittedly, this might just be my method - I'm a cultural studies major - but this is the way it's easiest for me to do. What is expected of a certain sex? Of a certain gender? What is forbidden to them? Do these two things coincide in all cases, or are there exceptions? Once you have the answers to these questions, just correct your character's behavior based on that;
- decide to what degree masculinity or femininity actually affects the character in question;
- decide what topics you're not comfortable with playing and talk to your DM about avoiding them.

And, finally,

- If you can predict how someone of the opposite sex will act in a reasonable number of situations, you can roleplay it.

Have fun. ;-) I know our group certainly does.

Edit, Update: Kinetic Diplomat - *raises hand* My character knows the effects of sleep - or in his case, trance - deprivation first hand. Yes, to the very extent you've indicated. This problem has come up more than once in our games, and if you don't get fed and watered (or blood, or whatever you subsist on) - you don't get to think about much else.

Kalirren
2011-07-20, 04:59 PM
Frozen_feet, I really don't understand where you're coming from now.


Uh, no. If anything, I tried to convey the exact opposite: we can compare real people to stereotypes, but it's very rare for people to fit the stereotypes.

I agree with that.


With sufficiently large sample population to determine the stereotypical averages, the division between what behaviours men exhibit and what they're -expected- to exhibit should become semantic.

But then you say this? Is this where we differ? You think it should work with large enough sample, I think it doesn't? I think you are making the assumption that large population makes it work better, in choosing to equate masculinity with stereotypical masculinity by definition. This is my whole point. I think a larger sample of people would actually make stereotypes less useful, because the space of gender expression that people occupy becomes more complex, starts to meaningfully vary along more axes, the more people you have. And there are always proportionally more outliers in higher-dimensional spaces. So the larger your population, perhaps the more "accurate" the stereotype may be on average, but simultaneously the less powerful and useful a notion it becomes for describing any individual person or small group of people. It's because of this that I typically prefer to look at how each subpopulation of interest takes an aggregate stereotype gender notion and constructs a more particular and more functional one for their own use and identity.

Am I missing something here?

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-20, 05:24 PM
You would also have to verify that sterotypes in question, are in fact, correct. In certain situations, men might display less aggression then women.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-20, 05:52 PM
But then you say this? Is this where we differ? You think it should work with large enough sample, I think it doesn't?

Yes, that might be it. You're calling for culture-specific stereotyping, where as I was looking to control for culture, to see which stereotypes hold true across humanity. Both approaches have their uses.

(One could make a general grid and then map out culture-specific grids on it, to simultaneously examine how different views of masculinity & femininity relate to each other and human tendencies as a species. It'd be a pretty complicated task, though.)

randomhero00
2011-07-20, 05:58 PM
whewww long thread. But I'll throw in my 2 copper.

When playing the opposite sex (at least at first) don't imagine them as *you* that's where that creepy feeling comes from. Imagine them as a sexy character in a novel. Now that doesn't mean it needs to be cliche or for her *AHEM* proportions to be unrealistic. Just small traits that you like in the opposite sex.

Think of personality traits you like in a woman. Think of anything else that works for you. I find books especially useful. Remember that woman from Neuromancer? She had implanted silver glass over her eyes and razor blades under her fingernails. For whatever reason I thought she was a really hot character.

So for instance, if I were to make a female character, I'd pull some stuff from her. Like give her silver eyes. Sharp nails. Or if playing a scifi the actual traits. This also helps keep your mind in thinking of them as a character from a novel that speaks through you or like you're reading a play whichever you prefer.

kamikasei
2011-07-20, 06:05 PM
... which is exactly why I think we should clear the confusion by agreeing on set things what they're supposed to embody. If we scrap them, then we need to come up with some other terminology to discuss the same thing, which is the exact same problem you said defining them would cause.
...
What language would you propose is clearer, then?
What I'm suggesting is that we leave "masculine" and "feminine" as messy, confused, badwrong words for harmful ideas, and accept the sad burden of having to maybe use more words when we want to discuss something more specific and clearer. I don't mean that we should never use the words, I mean that we should recognize that the words' meanings are not something to endorse.

If you define "masculine" as "the set of traits displayed more often by men than women as measured in a population", then you don't have a word for "the traits society says men should exhibit". You still have a phrase, though. So although it may take longer to say, I'm suggesting we use such phrases to be clear, and leave the brief but unhelpful candidate terms to their fate.

Acanous
2011-07-20, 07:02 PM
Well, in the interests of defining masculinity and feminity, as well as defending certain essentialisms, can we agree on the following for our further discussion? We can't very well say there is no such thing as a masculine or feminien trait after we've gone to great lengths to point out that society naturally shapes those traits...as does physiology, but since the citing wars would become bickering, we'll call it minor enough to ignore for now. Even if they are societally imposed, a few might include (others are welcome to help round out the discussion):

Masculine Traits

-Typically the social aggressor. With a few outliers on the bell curve, almost all societies have some form of the male putting in effort to gain access to females. Granted, it looks very different depending on the society. The universal example is whoring - the supply/demand curve, natural or artificially regulated, obviously supports and has historically supported, that accesss to sex is something men work to gain, with the reverse being that women do not typically have to do so.

-Typically associated with direct conflict, and more likely to resort to it. A throwback to meat-powered days, but still prevalent. For fantasy worlds which are still meat-powered, possibly more likely?

-Typically more loyal to organizations than to individuals. Yes, studies back it.

-Typically less associated with the household workings, especially in lower technology/economy societies.

-Typically have much less socially acceptable movement toward feminine modes than vice versa.

-Typically have more of a cultural sense of worth built around dominance, toughness, and ambition. In the assorted countries 1st world, 3rd world, and in between world that I've ever gone to "you're a girl/pansy/<insert local name for female genitalia>" implied less aggression, tougness, or willingness to accept risk.

-Typically more pressured to chase sex, typically more accepted societally to act on sexual impulses. Whether its victorian England, ancient greece, or modern day Japan the cards almost always come down on this one.

...feel free to add. I have not started to define feminine traits because I'm sure the above will create enough discussion.

Males are expected to be self-reliant. A man who requires aid has forfeited his right to that aid.

KineticDiplomat
2011-07-21, 02:27 AM
Touche.

Not strictly applicable to asking for common cause, or else we would have never got past chucking rocks at animals, but still well played.

Knaight
2011-07-21, 04:58 AM
whewww long thread. But I'll throw in my 2 copper.

When playing the opposite sex (at least at first) don't imagine them as *you* that's where that creepy feeling comes from. Imagine them as a sexy character in a novel. Now that doesn't mean it needs to be cliche or for her *AHEM* proportions to be unrealistic. Just small traits that you like in the opposite sex.

Yes, because obviously playing the opposite sex requires starting with a "sexy" character. If they aren't "sexy", then what's the point, the opposite sex is only there to be "sexy". Basing a character off of someone, fictional or real, who is admired, or respected, instead of viewed as sexy is obviously completely out of the question.
Sarcasm.

Ravens_cry
2011-07-21, 05:09 AM
I do the opposite in fact, my opposite gender characters tend to be decidedly unsexy, or at least not conventionally so. I find it easier to concentrate on their actual character then and avoid the accusation I am just in it for the jiggle physics.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-21, 05:33 AM
If you define "masculine" as "the set of traits displayed more often by men than women as measured in a population", then you don't have a word for "the traits society says men should exhibit". You still have a phrase, though. So although it may take longer to say, I'm suggesting we use such phrases to be clear, and leave the brief but unhelpful candidate terms to their fate.

Okay. It's a pretty long phrase, though. Maybe male-typical and female-typical would be better shorthands.

panaikhan
2011-07-21, 07:21 AM
One character I played (in Palladium's superhero RPG) was immensely fun.

It was based on one of their published villians, but a good guy...
Basically he was a 'female impersonator'. His "Secret Identity" was actually himself, and he dressed up as a Lady for his super-hero antics.

The group found both of my 'performances' perfectly plausible, and we all found the instances where the 'female' superhero attempted to disguise 'herself' as a man thoroughly amusing because that was done deliberately poorly.

(just a note for the above - the players knew about the dual identities, but their characters didn't)

Gardener
2011-07-21, 07:22 AM
I play a lot of female characters. Part of it does have to do with gender issues - making male characters feels somehow wrong if there's not some reason calling for it. But equally, I'm going to echo the cry that your character should have something that they are beyond "the other gender". That doesn't have to run completely contrary to stereotypes, but it helps if it's not just pandering to them. Maybe they've had to run away from everything they hold dear, and are trying to forge new bonds. One of my first female characters I was really happy with was a superhero who had to deal with some chronic health problems arising from the source of her powers - they didn't impede her in a round-to-round fight, but they still had an impact on her, both personally and professionally.

As far as inherent differences go, I don't think they're all that big. Too many "gendered" differences are culturally dependant for it to be mostly biological. And while men are stronger and more agressive than women in general, I'm willing to bet that any female water polo player is far stronger and more agressive than any of the male members of my university gaming club. Variation in individuals swamps the differences in averages in any case involving individuals. Now, societal pressure and stereotypes are interesting things to roleplay around, but unless you have a straight clone of your own culture in-game, you're going to have to deal with differences there whether you keep your gender or switch it.

Yora
2011-07-21, 09:43 AM
If you define "masculine" as "the set of traits displayed more often by men than women as measured in a population", then you don't have a word for "the traits society says men should exhibit".
It's not about display, It's about expectation.

kamikasei
2011-07-21, 09:56 AM
It's not about display, It's about expectation.
Not as Frozen Feet first suggested defining it, which is what I was talking about.

Frozen_Feet
2011-07-21, 10:17 AM
The definitions I proposed solely in defining what are male-typical, female-typical, or gender-non-specific traits. Not what should be.

Yora
2011-07-21, 11:04 AM
I do approve of this approach to gender, but as I see it, it's not actually neccessary that a trait is actually present mostly in men to be regarded as masculine, but that a sizable amount of people believe that said trait is present mostly in men.
If people want a trait they consider masculine to be present in men, is actually unimportant.

But it's believe how things are that is more important than how things actually are in reality. I think it's just two meanings of "expect" here. I meant "assume" and not "demand". (Though in english, I think expect really is not the best word. Too direct translation from German on my side, I guess.)

kyoryu
2011-07-21, 12:03 PM
It's tricky, just because a number of people will have some squick factor involved.

I think it's easier if you view your character from an "author" or "actor" point of view, and less of an "avatar" or "personal projection into the game world" sense. If that makes sense.

WarKitty
2011-07-21, 12:30 PM
It's tricky, just because a number of people will have some squick factor involved.

I think it's easier if you view your character from an "author" or "actor" point of view, and less of an "avatar" or "personal projection into the game world" sense. If that makes sense.

This really varies between groups. The group I got started in, you were likely to get more teasing if all your characters were your gender than otherwise. Including multiple characters that were clearly fairly strong representations of the player. But then, our group never held much stock in gender as an important factor, so...

Acanous
2011-07-21, 05:32 PM
On the subject of other races and our expectations therof, my group is rather racially insensitive towards Elves.
Can't hold your liquor? You drink like an elf. Fail a fortitude save in combat? You're fighting like an elf. If you try diplomancing monsters, you're talking to the animals, and that's pretty elfish. then there's the elf innuendo, and elf pride parades...

Hiro Protagonest
2011-07-21, 05:45 PM
On the subject of other races and our expectations therof, my group is rather racially insensitive towards Elves.
Can't hold your liquor? You drink like an elf. Fail a fortitude save in combat? You're fighting like an elf. If you try diplomancing monsters, you're talking to the animals, and that's pretty elfish. then there's the elf innuendo, and elf pride parades...

Then the DM makes an elf wizard of your CR and blows you all up, with an elf warblade/eternal blade bodyguard.

Icestorm245
2011-07-21, 06:20 PM
Firstly: Hi, I'm new to this site. How's it going? :)

Secondly: Man, in my 6 years of D&D my entire group had a hate on towards elves. The first major campaign we played I had a half-elf cleric and the other two guys had dwarven fighters. Yes, two dwarven fighters. Every time I swung a weapon and missed, I got "Maybe you should fight more like a man and less like an elf." Or "What do you know? You're only half a man." Being lawful evil, I tolerated this for a long time until I got divine power and righteous might. For a solid three sessions, I refused to heal anyone but myself, and only cast these two spells for every encounter. When one of them died, they said "What the ****?! Why didn't you heal me?!" I said "It wasn't my choice; the half a man there wanted to prove he was a full man." From that point on, they were really nice. Ah, it's awesome being a cleric!

JonRG
2011-07-21, 07:13 PM
I've played a male character in two games - one at the LGS and one with my friends.

The first started when me and the former DM both showed up with warblades, so one of us had to change. :smallwink: No female concepts came to me, but I had a secondary character (male NE wizard) on the back burner for a long time. With a few tweaks, my TN telepath's shenanigans would delight (most of) the party and make the LG divine caster facepalm at least once a session. :smalltongue:

The next was a gradual shift towards a 100% cross-gendered party, which actually helped get my character built. Some people had specific concepts, others just wanted to watch the DM go :smallmad:.

In both cases, the only issue I faced was occasional pronoun confusion. :smallbiggrin:

Yukitsu
2011-07-21, 07:22 PM
On the subject of other races and our expectations therof, my group is rather racially insensitive towards Elves.
Can't hold your liquor? You drink like an elf. Fail a fortitude save in combat? You're fighting like an elf. If you try diplomancing monsters, you're talking to the animals, and that's pretty elfish. then there's the elf innuendo, and elf pride parades...

This happened in my group until I came along, since I play mostly elves, and can kick most of their asses in game and out. :smallwink: Now they mostly chew out gnomes while I bitch about kender. (Or say "oh ****, elves, run away" without any particular irony come to think about it.)

Honest Tiefling
2011-07-21, 07:27 PM
Gnomes are my favorite non-human race, so it does make me sad when people treat them like they are mad inventors. Even in settings where they're mostly very shy farmers and craftsmen.

Kender...Are just badly designed. So maybe I don't have room to speak, but anything that does constant PvP actions and tries to kill the party does not get to use the 'But the world is better off with our race and we're so pure-hearted!'. I guess I'm just a hypocrite.

More on topic, I will say that guys tend to be poorly viewed in some circles for playing female elves. The first question they will receive is if their elf is in a bikini or not.

Acanous
2011-07-21, 08:50 PM
It did get bad enough to upset one player OOC, and we've since toned it down quite a bit, but there's always an occasional Elf crack in a session, somewhere.

Still, there ARE some steriotypes that we as players can project that are not gender based.

Of course, playing a Female Elf in this instance will only compound the issue... >.>

gkathellar
2011-07-21, 09:11 PM
Personally, all this "masculine/feminine" nonsense sounds awfully weak and smash-worthy (http://twitter.com/#!/feministhulk) to me. Certainly our culture affects our conclusions regarding these matters, and certainly there are some biological distinctions, but "masculine traits" are usually just traits we personally expect/hope to encounter in men, and feminine traits are usually just traits we personally expect/hope to encounter in women. Any given one of those traits can be positive or negative in your perspective, but they're still broad ways to categorize your expectations of people due to gender.

In game, this can be interesting to work with consciously, creating characters with specific gender perceptions or playing off of the perceptions of the established setting, but that's a tricky road to go down and not for everyone. So, yeah, playing the opposite gender is mostly an exercise in one's own preconceptions about gender, and it can be a pretty enlightening experience if you take it seriously.

Of course, some people just have preferences. I usually play male characters in tabletop games and I almost always play female characters in video games, and when I'm not actively pushing myself I stick to those guns.

UrsielHauke
2011-08-06, 12:34 AM
I think the fact of the matter is that, regardless of what you do to the contrary, it's painfully inevitable that there are going to be jokes at your/ your character's expense due to this fact. For example:

:roy: to :miko: : Honestly, you can't tell me you would be this tightly wound if you were receiving Treasure type O regularly.

Nevertheless, there should be, generally, no greater difference between male and female characters as there are between males and females in the real world. Obviously, this could be different depending on your campaign setting, just like how it was different than today back in the 11th century (or in some parts of the world today); and this can apply inversely to matriarchal societies as well as patriarchal societies. And it's true, the hardest thing to do (at least for me) is to avoid playing your character over the top; and this doesn't just apply to gender; i.e. the mad sociopathic wizard with grey hair (aka my math teacher, funny story about that...), the pyromaniacal gnome alchemist, etc. Nobody needs to adhere to stereotypes, in real life or in game, but they wouldn't be stereotypes if there wasn't a kernel of truth in them. If you want to have a realistic, genuine character, simply think about how women are treated differently from men in the real world and take that into consideration with your background and characterization. Also, talk to your DM, there may or may not be some way that women are treated differently in the respective cultures of the game world.

Dr.Epic
2011-08-06, 12:40 AM
I don't know how you RP them, but for me it's like the last few panels of this comic. (http://www.goblinscomic.com/08192005/):smallwink:

WarKitty
2011-08-06, 12:51 AM
I think the fact of the matter is that, regardless of what you do to the contrary, it's painfully inevitable that there are going to be jokes at your/ your character's expense due to this fact. For example:

:roy: to :miko: : Honestly, you can't tell me you would be this tightly wound if you were receiving Treasure type O regularly.

You'd be surprised. There are multiple groups out there where opposite-gender characters aren't considered out of the ordinary at all.

Cerlis
2011-08-06, 05:18 AM
Yes, because obviously playing the opposite sex requires starting with a "sexy" character. If they aren't "sexy", then what's the point, the opposite sex is only there to be "sexy". Basing a character off of someone, fictional or real, who is admired, or respected, instead of viewed as sexy is obviously completely out of the question.
Sarcasm.

all he was doing was giving a successful technique for anyone having trouble roleplaying the opposite sex. He didnt say "Real women are hot, so if you play a woman you have to be hot!"



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I think one thing that might help is completely take away the idea of "Masculine" and "feminine" from their respective genders. you could have a magical or alien race in which all the males where feminine and all the females where masculine. A biologist might say such a divergence would be less helpful to the species (since many masculine traits supposidly aid the SIngle-male-loner-protector,and many feminine traits supposidly aid the Family-female-caretaker) but it would still be a feasible species. the only difference to between their society and ours is that, in our eyes, it would be the men having babies and then going off to work (or whatever)

Essentially look less at overused words used to diverge the sexes, and think about the traits that seem to go together in any pairing.

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PS. this is why i think it would be very interesting for a mature intelligent group to play in a campaign to where they all come from a society in which the male and female gender differ GREATLY from each other and perhaps with their societal roles reversed.

FOr instance a Lizard species, where the females are large size, short tailed, thick Warriors. Since they lay eggs and the females gestate seasonally (meaning not all of them are going through it at one time), there is no harm in a few going into heat, incubating for a few weeks, and once they lay their eggs go back to their Warrior, and governing business. Perhaps the Males are Small sized (so many times smaller than the females) and instead of looking like a cross between an ogre and a lizardfolk with the proportion of one of those fat slaads, they have feathered heads (the better for the species to distinguish workers and divey out chores), and bird like beaks, 4 arms, no tail at all. They would be more numerous, horribly weaker, with an instinctive ability to work together, each one working as constructors, nurse maids, healers .if one gets put in a guild that doesnt match their head feathers, they die it the appropriate colors.
AH! thats it, i was trying to think of a third distinctive trait. While the females are more like dwarves or Orcs in that they are physically superior in all ways, the males have as much magical affinity as gnomes. Like them each is born with a knack (usually affecting their feather color, making it easy to identify a Male's knack). You might occassionally get one born who inherits his father's feather color, but his mother's latent magical ability (from her father).

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TL;DR I think its fun to think about the percieved differences and similarities , constructed differences and similarities ,as well as actual biological and actual psychological differences and similarities between sexes and play up on that, rather than pretending there is no difference whatsoever.

Frozen_Feet
2011-08-06, 09:58 AM
I think one thing that might help is completely take away the idea of "Masculine" and "feminine" from their respective genders. you could have a magical or alien race in which all the males where feminine and all the females where masculine. ... Essentially look less at overused words used to diverge the sexes, and think about the traits that seem to go together in any pairing.


That'd be possible within the context of the grid I posted, actually. Using the culture-controlled version, we'd have a map for how different species seem in relation to typical behaviour of humans; akin to the way where normal distribution of human abilities is modeled by the 3 - 18 range, and differences of other species are given as adjustments to that.

Tzi
2011-08-06, 11:30 AM
There really is no difference. I in fact roll a d6 to determine the sex of my characters.

I think the issue is determining how others interact with your characters sex and how the societies react to it. What are the advantages, prejudices, disadvantages and expectations of females? of males?

Maybe a male character doing something is more accepted then a female, maybe a female character can get away with certain actions a male cannot.

Beyond that the only physical problems are the disadvantages vis a vis sex, if that is part of the campaign. If a male character gets a female in the game pregnant he is less responsible in a way. No stat penalties and he can always run off and the player is still very mobile and viable. A female character has to be a bit more careful as the consequences of sex are far greater.

It can affect you play style depending on the social environment and what sort of character you play.

Welknair
2011-08-06, 11:45 AM
I'm DMing a group of five individuals - one male and four females. And yet we have three female characters. My players have a bad track record of not wearing enough clothes when they play girls. It's a problem.