Cross-gender play
This week’s WISH asks what is to be made of cross-gender gaming, people who play characters of a different gender.
I think it’s an aspect of the greatest gift of gaming: the chance to walk around in another person’s shoes.
Like any gift, it can be horribly misused. Chainmail-bikini-clad elf babes, damsels in distress, willing barmaids… most gamers know the drill here. Any game I play in had better do better than this.
I confess that I don’t play male characters often. I took over a male NPC in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign and tried not to make a mess of him. Got him killed, unfortunately (not that I could have avoided it). I have played other players’ male PCs in the players’ absence, and again tried to be true to what I knew of the character.
I don’t always succeed, though for reasons unrelated to gender. I took over a cleric character a few sessions ago, and got the comment, “When you play [character name], he’s a scholar and a gentleman, whereas when [character’s owner] plays him, he’s blissed-out on [deity].” Oops. My bad.
I haven’t found playing male characters particularly jarring or difficult, though I get a tiny (tiny!) bit irked when other players accidentally refer to the character as “she.” I’m sure there’s something to be written there about the male as norm and the female as Other, but you’ll be glad to know I don’t have the energy for that at the moment.
My male gaming buddies are a little more adventurous; we’ve got a female barbarian and a female ship-captain played by (different) males, to add to my two gals and those of the other female player. I have no quarrel whatever with the gender portrayals of the characters in question. None. Lest you think that’s because there’s no sex involved—the ship-captain is pretty promiscuous. Since it fits with her personality and history, and promiscuous is a long way from being all there is to her personality—it’s perfectly fine.
A game a (male) friend of mine recently pointed out to me makes gender-bending all but a necessity, for most gaming groups anyway. (Has anyone, anywhere, ever managed to put together an all-female gaming group?) The game is Trollbabe, and despite the truly terrible and off-putting name, I recommend it highly, as much for the innovative notions of “narrativist” game play as for expanding one’s gender horizons. (Spring for the download—it’s only ten bucks!)
The setup is thrillingly simple, in contrast to most games that rely on complicated mechanics. Your character is a trollbabe, a female troll-human hybrid with human intelligence and social orientation, the brute strength of trolls, and the ability to learn either troll or human magic. Humans hate trolls; trolls hate humans. Trollbabes live in between; whenever they show up, stakes get higher because trollbabes disrupt the status quo.
A trollbabe character has one statistic (one!), that controls how well she fights, slings magic, and handles social situations. The player chooses what the number will be, and can adjust it in play.
End of setup. Go and game. Honestly, it’s not much more complicated than that.
(And if anyone already familiar with Trollbabe wants a player for a PBeM, call my name! I gotta try this thing!)
Anyway, I’m all for gender-bending, and I may have more to say about it once I read the other WISH responses. If all our characters were exactly like their players, what would be the point?
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