Gender Roles
You know what I always liked about World of Warcraft? It’s this little chunk of text right here:
“In the game… men and women are equal in Azeroth, so the only differences between the two genders are cosmetic.”
– World of Warcraft manual, p.15
When you’re worldbuilding, it’s tempting to gloss over hot-button issues like gender and sexuality. After all, you’re trying to tell a story about high adventure and daring do and dragon slaying, dammit! Why bog down the adventure with all this irrelevant stuff? Tolkien didn’t pause the action for identity politics!
Here’s the thing though. Even if “the story” isn’t explicitly about the relationship between the sexes, an RPG is more than a story. It’s also a simulation. When you’re running a game based on (pseudo) medieval Europe or (alternate history) ancient Japan or Arabian Nights (but with magic!), the source cultures bring very different ideas of gender to the table. These details also happen to be extremely relevant to the setting. Same deal if you’re one of those poor oppressed male drow down in Menzoberranzan. This stuff is going to come up.
That’s why I like the WoW take on these things. It acknowledges the issue, then addresses it quickly and efficiently (if not particularly creatively).
How about you guys? How do you deal with gender and sexuality in your games? Do you downplay it? Make it a major setting detail? Try to ignore it? Let’s hear it in the comments.
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Every D&D video game i’ve played has also called attention to, then dismissed, the issue in a similar way. From Baldur’s Gate:
“Females of the Realm can excel in any area they wish, and are easily the equals of their male counterparts in every skill or respect.”
I like it that way too. Like you said, i’m not here to play (or run) a game about gender politics. I get enough of that in real life. Of course, players will want to portray the gender of their own character, so these things cannot be totally ignored. Still, I like a more idealistic world than our own.
On this subject, I like when people take the time to roleplay their character’s sexuality to some degree. Our group’s Halfling Druid expressed her love to my human War Cleric at the end of that campaign, attracted to each other by their shared experiences and their differing yet compatible philosophies, and they settled down together. A Berserker in one campaign fell in love with a Lamia and it was surprisingly sweet. A Totem Barbarian in the LMoP game I run was disappointed to learn that Venomfang was lying about having an older sister, stating that he would have tried to seduce such a grand and powerful creature. I encourage these things because often this aspect is skipped over in a rush to not be “that guy” (or girl), but it really does add depth to a character in a way that doesn’t have to be inappropriate.
Ever read these books? There’s some crazy cross-species sci-fi romance going on in orbit around Saturn. Those are the first books that I stumbled across that really took gender and made it an interesting part of the SF setting. That said, I’m not sure I’d introduce hermaphroditic centaurs to one of my games.
No, but that certainly looks interesting. Thanks for the recommendation. =)
I’d allow a lot of wiggle room, but since I tend to switch gaming groups a lot, so I’m never really sure who’d make their sexy sorceress a lesbian as an excuse for some fantasy girl-on-girl action… possibly with the Black Tentacles spell added in the mix.
As things stand, I just tend to ignore it. Considering that the phrases “wiggle room” and ” Black Tentacles” in the same sentence made me chuckle like 12-year-old, it’s probably for the best.
Oof. I think we’ve all encountered this guy. You want to keep an inclusive table on the one hand, but you want to avoid magical realms on the other. Not an easy balancing act.
The trick is to have consistent members, isn’t it? Knowing who might try to pull something like this is half the battle.
Unfortunately “cantmakeitosis” appears to be terminal at my tables…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/scheduling-conflicts
For a second there, I thought that “cantmakeitosis” was the technical term for tentacle-based romance. I am not a clever man.
We’ve always deliberately pushed our worlds socially towards gender equality, with the explanation that the fact that people get incredibly powerful abilities seemingly at random (sorcerous bloodlines, superpowers, magic) tends to even things out. It’s one thing in historical reality when your women never receive any training to put them in any sort of advantage in a fight or struggle – it’s another entirely when any woman anywhere can suddenly manifest the ability to kill you with a glance.
I was given to understand that women could only “kill with a glance” in Ballroom Blitz scenarios.
Personally i just leave it at “gender equality” and thats it until the topic comes up in a relevant fashion (character trying to seduce his way past an obstacle) and whatnot.
I heavily dislike when its forced by the players tho. I had a game once where one guy played a blond elf ranger. The likeness to Legolas was completly coincidental but it was there. A girl in the group tho, in person, was heavily infatuated with Legolas, were talking borderline obssession and it would materialize as her character obnoxiously flirting with the ranger at all time (and the implicit sexual undertones were not subtle.)
Thats where it crosses the line for me, when you hafistedly force it on others.
I think that’s an all-too-common experience, which is really too bad. Romance can add a lot to a game, but it takes a lot of work to pull off.
For example, I was lucky enough to have some really excellent players attempt a romantic subplot. Lots of drama, simmering resentment, and zero awkwardness. Player maturity eff tee dub. Here’s how it went down.
One of the PCs, a gruff old bear type, gave up the love of his life for arcane power. His lover sold her soul in despair. So she comes back out of the underworld to find him, spends the whole campaign adventuring beside him, and finally gets him to fall back in love, sacrificing his power in turn.
So it’s grand finale time, and the last scene of the last session comes around. Evil is defeated, the forces of Hell held at bay, etc. He goes in for the kiss, and the whole table is ready for Gone With the Wind: iconic tableau, lower curtain, roll credits. But she puts a hand up to stop him.
“I’ve been chasing you too long. Now it’s your turn.”
She walks off into the sunset, he swears to follow after. Lower curtain. Roll credits. End of campaign.
How cruel lol.
I find it sad really, its much easier to find stories of awkward romance/went south than good stories of it.
They worked together A LOT away from the table. That mess takes planning.
See, Thief? You guys could have gotten inside already if you’ve just allowed Cleric work his magic. But no, you had to butt in, with your racial penalty to charisma you likely also dumped, and now it’s time to roll initiative. While Cleric’s prone and out of (proper) armor. Good job.
As for the issues of gender and sexuality, I would just like to give kudos to guys at Paizo. For a “grimmer and darker” version of D&D, Golarion is suprisingly progressive in regards to those topics (with a few exceptions… coughtWTF why is Erastil LG, he should clearly be LNcough).
Guard: “Actually, I’m nonhominidasexual. I’m only attracted to characters who don’t identify as humanoid.”
Thief: “But I’m an outsider!”
Guard: “Well yeah. The gates are closed, so Q.E.D….”
I feel like the god of hunting, plants, and community would be more along the lines of Neutral Good, just by dint of ‘here’s a leg up for everyone around you’ sorts of domains.
Now playing an Inquisitor of Erastil and being limited on my ability to properly grimdark ‘Inquisit’…I really don’t get why he’s LG either.
As far as Gender goes my crew tends to have equality. Which is a good thing since I play almost exclusively female characters, and a number of the others play a lot of them too. We have one active girl in the group, and ironically I think she has had the highest rate of male characters.
As far as sexuality, it comes up occasionally but more as side-RP or the occasional OOC joke (some of us are *really* fond of crack-ships between polar opposite characters.) Personally I don’t partake much in the romanticism but my characters are always assumed to be bi unless I say otherwise.
I always have trouble with the voices when I cross-play. Very self-conscious, you know? Afraid I sound like I-don’t-like-SPAM lady from Monty Python.
Maybe this is a tad late, but I hope you’ll see it… Seriously, don’t sweat the voices. If you use your normal voice, any decent table will be ok with that 🙂 I listen to a lot of audio books, and noticed recently that pitch is much less of a deal than I assumed it would be. Tony Robinson reads all the Discworld viewpoint characters from chainsmoker Vimes to young Polly Perks in his own voice and it’s fine. (Crossreference some of the UK Potter books where some of the women sound strange because Stephen Fry is forcing his pitch.)
My groups crossplay all over the place (we’re a pretty even gender mix because our player pool is mostly made up of gaming couples) and while I see a lot of vocal quirks (I used to have a mage who sucked his teeth when anything dangerous came into melee range, we’ve had a floaty-voiced creepy Nobilis character of dubious motive, and we currently have a medic with a bit of a stutter) and the occasional accent, pitch is just less of a thing. I see it sometimes when a character is putting it on for effect: “Oh… OH NO I MAY FAINT~”
Personally I miss running AFF with a ton of house rules in my teens, where all orc speech had a finger in the corner of the mouth for tusks, and all goblin speech came through a held nose. Then again, I grew up into a filthy LARPer…
I think it was a Fear the Boot host that mentioned his female pirate captain NPC. She spoke straight up like Barbosa, but it didn’t matter. The point was that the voice was *different.* It was enough to signal the character, never-mind that it didn’t sound like a perfect Pirate King Elizabeth Swann. I think that’s a good piece of advice to bear in mind. 🙂
I think almost every gamer has tried cross gender characters, but the groups I’ve played with in the past decade or so have always had a good mix of player genders, so when someone is cross playing, it’s rather obvious it’s a guy trying to RP a lady when there are real ladies to compare the rp to right next to him. So our groups tend to stick to their own genders.
I feel ya. See my SPAM comment above.
Most of the time, the difference between being a guy and a girl is ignored unless the situation obviously dictates that it be recognized. Eowyn-in-full-kit aside, trying to disguise yourself as a soldier in the barracks of an otherwise all male army is much easier when you aren’t a woman. Even beyond that, the difficulty goes down somewhat when you haven’t spent sessions worth of time describing how voluptuous your 17 Charisma says you are as a sorceress.
This is one of those ‘way back when I knew That Guy…’ stories. It ends predictably.
Those circumstance penalties to Disguise can be a real bitch. :/
Cross-play comes pretty naturally to me, to be honest. *shrugs* It’s just not something I’m so concerned about. Pretending to be a guy isn’t that different from pretending to be a dwarf, if you see what I mean.
Like Cookie above, I’m really enamoured with Paizo’s successes in variance of all types. Sexuality, gender both physiological and mental, race, age and even various kinds of disability… it has it all, really.
Very real difference between men and dwarves: one of these things exists in the primary world, and probably at your table. There’s not much chance you’ll offend the dwarven player by acting a little too Scottish. If you go full Mulan however…
http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k283/Benvolio7/Mulan/Mulanmanly.jpg
I do see your point, and I can see how my original message is thus flawed. However, I prefer to treat fantasy races with as much respect as they should be afforded in-world, so my baseline for playing a Dwarf is a lot higher than “Scottish Accent”, especially since that’s my actual accent. I try not to Mulan it up, and I encourage others to try cross-playing too! It’s a great way to learn about genders and widen one’s perspectives, like the unfortunate half-Orc in another comment thread did for one player’s attitude towards racism. Your example with the fashionista rogue is a great example. This isn’t all from tabletop experience, by the way, so you’ll probably know more about the gender scene there. I just know I’m lucky to be part of the Pathfinder generation rather than, say, 2e…
I also have a bit of a fascination with the concept of gender for a number of reasons, so I make sure to know what I’m doing before I play a specific gender in a specific role. I’m hopefully about to start playing a Kval, and they don’t even HAVE genders, so that’ll be fun. (I’ve put my own spin on it though; she’s raised by gnomes and thus took the female identity as a sign of respect to their society, even though she doesn’t really care much either way.)
Talking of Dwarves and genders… can we just appreciate how well Sir Pterry handled both and how they interact? The man is a genius.
Copper slingbacks are indeed a mark of genius.
Mechanically, genders are the same in my world. All the races I let players play are fairy standard humanoids, and trying to hard-code gender difference into game mechanics is just begging for trouble. Any gender differences are purely cultural, which still allows you enough leeway for interesting role-playing situations, but by making it nurture instead of nature you deprive any critics of a lot of ammunition.
You could of intentionally design a fantasy race with significant gender dimorphism of course, but if that’s your intent then why not go whole-hog and make it REALLY weird? So that rather than male vs. female, you’ve got snarg, ithim, and effil, and your gender identity is more of the blue-and-orange-and-mauve to everyone else’ black and white.
These guys approve.
I’m the only gay guy in my gaming group and though LGBT issues sometimes come up, it’s really the exception. The most notable example would be my elderly gay paladin of Erastil. He and his husband had taken in numerous orphans over the years to raise like their own children and were pillars of the community. When his husband died(natural causes), he found himself called to be a paladin and would come to visit his many kids and grandkids as often as possible. He was a really fun character to play as he tended to break a lot of paladin conventions whether it be his sexuality or, from a min-maxers perception, his advanced age. He tended to be the party’s voice of reason reigning in the younger “spitefires” with grandfatherly advice and the repeated motto of, “not all fightin’ takes place with swords and spells, boy” whenever he was encouraging a more diplomatic and stable approach.
Welcome to the comic, Paul!
That’s how I tend to play (and write) my characters as well: Sexuality is an aspect of character, but it usually doesn’t serve as the focus of character. At least not until it’s a narrative necessity. To that end, you said that LGBT issues sometimes come up. Under what circumstances? What parts of the story require that they leap into the foreground?
I had a fighter, former soldier, that one day while trying to estimate the amount of potential threat posed by ruffians in a seedy harbor dive in Neverwinter accidentally had this purely utilitarian act of looking for signs of disdain, agression or similar indicators that things might go south described as “checking out the sailors in the tavern”. While that was not initially my intention, my character’s backstory had no mention of any kind of romance or family, and thus the “Rule of Hilarity” decided my char was now officially gay. From then on, I slid a couple more double entendre’s into describing interactions or dialogue (I’d argue most of them were still accidental, but nobody would believe me so I might as well claim they were totally intentional).
Nice! This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say, “I want to discover my character, not invent him.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/wizard-quiz
When it comes to gender roles in a game. I follow the following steps.
1) I start with historical or trope norms of my base culture
2) Adjust the “how evil were the men” & “how evil were the women” tuners. While some differences in gender norms can be attributed to sexual dimorphia, most of it boils down to “Who were the bigger dicks?” There is a big difference between a medieval society that wants to keep its women at home because they are the only ones who can nurse the numerous children they have to have to keep their population up, and a medieval society where the men cook up a religion that blames women-kind for everything that is wrong with the world and thus deserve even the most brutal subjugation.
Most of the time I turn the dials down low unless I want to emphasize some form of bigotry. The end result of turning down the dials is that you end up with a world with a lot of authentic trappings of a medieval world (a lot of work divisions arose from sexual dimorphism, not misogyny) but there no discrimination when someone crosses gender norms.
I appreciate that you’re coming at it from a “what kind of story do I want to tell” perspective. Playing in an unequal society doesn’t mean your endorsing it, and I think that’s an important detail to remember.
Also of note, “The Bigotry Dial” sounds like an interesting premise for an maguffin artifact. It’s probably got different levels, so that on the highest setting you only respond positively to members of your Race / Sex / Class / Age Category. Everyone else is your enemy!
Tolkien did, though.
Care to elaborate?
In a Star Trek Klingon game (the old FASA one), my wife, playing the ships doctor, after ordering all players to go through a sort of real life medical check-up, then proceeded to try and see if any of the characters were interested in some hanky-panky, the Klingon way. Turns out my first officer (me being the Captain of the ship) is interested, as they had the same “hobby”, namely interrogation/torture (or some-such). And over the course of the campaign the characters became lovers, and eventually partners.
In other games both my wife and me as players, and as a GMs, try to use it “as appropriate”. So my wife’s female Shadowrun hit(wo)men would use her Feminine whiles to extract info from NPC’s. Also me as a GM in Pendragon, when a knight wanted info, and then (played by a girl, by the way) deliberately targeted the ugliest maid for his flirting, reasoning that she would probably enjoy the attention, and then missing his Flirting role, gave him quite some lip as the maid.
Lets face it, sexuality is something that will come up in any game not playing in a strictly one sex environment, and even then it will be present, (All those monks/soldiers/seaman together…) so not thinking about some way to handle it, is just short-sighted. Players have their expectations, either based on real life, or on their idea of the setting. Equality will be much more expected in Star Trek (and other SF games), then in Pendragon for instance. Oriental\Middle-Eastern based fantasy will see less equality (even if historically it might be very different from our perception). Victorian is somewhat difficult. Although quite e few strong woman (Queen Vic for one) were present, society was much less acceptant of woman “outside their world”. But fiction and Hollywood have been showing us those women, so playing it historically can be off-putting for quite a lot of players. But then you can always play Steampunkish, which is fantasy anyway.
So my point: As sexuality and gender (roles) are part of our world(s), both the GM and the players, should have some idea about their expectations about those, within the game they are playing. And if those expectations are not at least partly the same, or seem to diverge during a campaign, either devote a session on it, and try to see if there is again some common ground to reach, or there is an In Game explanation for the difference, ask people to leave if their views diverge too much from what the rest of the group see as expectable, or end the campaign before some or all players and/or the GM, loose the fun.
I think this is an especially difficult point. If you try to play with historical attitudes but wind up ham-fisting it, a female PC might feel unfairly targeted. If you excise historical attitudes then the setting can seem anodyne. I’ve probably seen this issue come up the most in historical Cthulhu games, and I’m not sure there’s a good solution beyond “learn to walk the tightrope.”
It’s also I think a matter of what the group wants and expects (which may not be the same!). Some groups want, and can, play with less priviliged characters in a strict stratified society. Others may want it, but then can’t handle it. As you say, it is a tightrope, but open communication about the between players, and players and GM, should take the sting out of it, and get the expectations, and the lack of fulfilment (eiter negative or positive) of those, in the open.
And in a way the whole Level system in D&D(ish) games can amount to the same thing. When a fresh lvl 4 character comes into a group of lvl 10 characters, there will be friction, not just because the character is percieved as not (being able to) pull his weight….
As a transgender Gamemaster, I’m not afraid to admit to replacing a -1 longsword with a Girdle of Opposite Gender when a fighter displayed less than enlightened gender views.
On the off chance you didn’t realize, you might be amused to know that that blonde in the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy image at the bottom of this page is Fighter.
My favorite way of dealing with it is how Deadlands works it into the background of the setting. The actual Wild West was full of sexism and racism (and slavery), but the Weird West draws from the examples of the World Wars to posit that the pressures of a continuing Civil War would force a) the South to free its slaves (as they were already turning towards in desperation for fresh soldiers in actual history, though they lost the war before anything could come of that), b) women’s status to grow as they take on the roles traditionally filled by men who are currently away fighting, and c) their status as independent, third parties would lead to the native american tribes growing greatly in power.
A big part of the appeal of a fantasy roleplaying game is dealing with situations that you don’t have to deal with in real life. As a result, I sometimes like to over-exaggerate certain social issues far beyond the limits they ever reached in real life, just like the political scheming and the adventuring lifestyle and the dangerous wilderness are all over-exaggerated. They’re challenges for players to overcome.
And I also like the idea of players who aren’t sexist in real life roleplaying a character who is sexist, or vice-versa. Getting into the mindset of someone who has different ideas than you do in real life about what’s right and what’s wrong is a huge part of the appeal of roleplaying, and is the main reason why the alignment system still exists in modern RPGs (since it’s certainly not there for mechanical reasons any more).
D&D isn’t about being who you want. It’s about being who you aren’t. Adding moral flaws to your character is one of the most interesting things you can do, and imagining the mindset of someone who lived in a society that had very different ideas about right and wrong than modern society is extremely interesting.
That’s a fine way to play it, but it’s not the only way. Problems can come up when this philosophy butts heads with the “power fantasy” version of the game where folks want to play some kind of ideal self. That tends to be a new player style, so I think it’s important to let those newer folks know that disagreement between characters isn’t necessarily an indictment of the human beings at the table.