The Blog of Roon

My poor Dragonhunt GM emailed me in response to yesterday’s offhanded comment that the Dragonhunt world was sexist. He was (and has been for some time) concerned that sexism would eat away at my enjoyment of the game. Given that I have a whole category devoted to sexism, and a significant percentage of what’s there is gaming-related posts, I certainly can’t tell him it’s an unwarranted worry.

He can chill, though. It doesn’t really work that way.

The fact of the matter is, I’ve never-not-even-once played in a game world that wasn’t sexist. Gender of the GM doesn’t matter. Gender of the game-writers doesn’t matter (though there aren’t a whole lot of women writing games, and it shows). Genre of game doesn’t matter. They have ALL been sexist, one way or another, whether it’s full-blown gonzo barefoot-and-pregnant sexism or quieter, separate-but-eh-more-or-less-equal sexism.

(One or two have attempted a bit of reverse sexism, e.g. Trollbabe, which I’ve actually never played but would still like to. Even so.)

So if I insisted on gender-egalitarian gameworlds, I’d be doing an awful lot of no gaming.

In my judgment, we don’t even know quite how to imagine a non-sexist world; I’ve never read a so-called feminist utopian fantasy that struck me as workable or even desirable. (Sheri Tepper got very close once, by granting humans control over whether sex leads to conception in the last pages’ deus-ex-machina closer—but only female humans. Bzzt. Wrong answer. LeGuin got this mechanic right with the Hainish, though.)

A sexist gameworld, like all gameworlds, is a reflection of what we can’t quite manage to get away from. All by itself, that’s not enough to throw me off. I’m used to sexist worlds; I live in one.

So what does throw me for a loop? Herewith, a partial list:

• Gameworld restrictions based on hardcoded, so-called “real-world” limitations on women. For example, female PCs can’t be as strong as male PCs because we all know women aren’t as strong as men. Where do I even start with thinking like that? It isn’t whether women are as strong as men; it’s whether my PC is stronger than your PC—and back in the day before my wrists entirely went, I used to win arm-wrestles handily, thanks.
• Corollary to the above, gameworlds where restrictions on women (unaccompanied by restrictions on men, naturally) are considered a fine and wonderful thing by GM and players.
• Gratuitous out-of-character sexism, particularly when it assumes that women do not game, thereby making those of us who do game invisible. For example.
• Gameworlds where all NPC women are young, leggy, big-breasted, round-heeled barmaids. That or hags. (Not crones, hags.)
• Gameworlds where all PC women are expected to be young, leggy, big-breasted, and preferably round-heeled.
• Gameworlds so relentlessly anti-woman that I can’t come up with a PC I’d want to play. (Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sorry to say I think it could.) A large part of this, I think, would be whether I can use the PC to resist the gameworld’s existing social structures. If I can’t, there’d better be damn good in-game reason why not—and acceptance that I’d do it anyway.

Has the Dragonhunt ever irked me? Sure it has. The pressure to pair Renate off has occasionally gotten old (I lampooned it in the society-page puff-piece I wrote), and I think the other players could stand to dial down their impressions of her physical attractiveness a bit, as I explicitly made her much less pretty than her kid sister Sabine. She’s a work horse, not a show horse.

However. I’ve had free rein to say no, and free rein to kick over the traces both in-character (Renate’s been about as sharp with Aryk as Renate ever gets—while Sabra, being rather less polite than Renate, has called a spade a spade) and out-of-character. Aryk’s player knows full well that Aryk is a bit of a jerk, in more ways than sexism can account for; part of Aryk’s character arc is growing out of that. That’s cool. Lots of people have to learn these things; why not simulate the process?

And on the rare occasion I’ve had concerns, I’ve been listened to out-of-game with respect. That’s all I need.

What’s more, sometimes I’ve had my nose rubbed in my own sexist assumptions, which is all to the good. Last session, a lieutenant-colonel in Ilium’s answer to SWAT rode up and introduced herself as Shandria Klein. Yup, you guessed it—I’d initially assumed the lieu had to be a guy. Instead, she reminds me a little of Bellis, an old character of mine. I quite liked her, and the mental kick in the pants her presence gave me.

Have I ever played a sexist character? Yup. Alex of Galactic Renaissance was designed to be seriously over-chivalric, the kind of guy a gal can’t bloody well get rid of because he’s so terribly concerned she’ll be hurt by the big bad world. Afletana and Delphine had fairly stratified notions of where women belonged in the scheme of things. Shirley was, well, Victorian. As I said—it’s impossible to get away from. Best I can do is acknowledge it, play with it, subvert it.

Gaming is partly about exploration to me, always has been. No reason sexism can’t be one thing to explore, and plenty of reason that it should. As long as there’s a base awareness that in-game scenarios don’t reflect out-of-game disrespect, I don’t object. Dragonhunt meets that criterion handily.

The cunning plan that could not fail did not, in fact, fail. Really, it was quite simple. We had to play keep-away with a rock in the middle of a public park. Said park, per the GM, contained a fish-pond. We chucked the rock in the fish-pond and collected it later. End of problem.

Well, end of that problem. The nasty bodyguard was still a problem. The best Renate and I could do as a backup plan was taking the chieftain hostage, which is remarkably ineffectual in Dragonhunt-world because death isn’t permanent, so killing the hostage effectively ends the hostage situation. Rennie did the (dis)honors, because the bodyguard had just done Aryk considerable damage and Rennie was peeved about it, but I am reliably informed that if she hadn’t, the bodyguard would have.

Nonetheless, the bodyguard seized the opportunity to take Rennie down in two seconds flat. (She didn’t put up much of a resistance, knowing that to be pointless. Her best efforts would only have delayed the inevitable slightly, and given him key knowledge about how to defeat her in future.) So she trusted her friends to rescue her, as in fact they speedily did. And Rien, relieved to see her back on her feet—unexpectedly kissed her.

Oops.

Those poor, poor kids. They really do care for each other a great deal, Renate and Rien, as I hinted before. But for a variety of reasons, a liaison is (as Renate told an indignant Aryk later) eighteen different flavors of bad idea. So after a sad and awkward discussion, it’s the old Tristram-and-Iseult sword-down-the-bed thing for them. They’ll always be fond of each other (aside from the doubtless extremely unpleasant upcoming interlude when Renate finds out his real origins); they can’t help it. But the world is larger than the both of them, unfortunately.

Part of it, of course, is that Certain Things Are Expected of a young noblewoman. I have explained to the GM that if he’s interested in Renate’s romantic possibilities, somebody with sufficient authority needs to hint to her that it’s all right if she experiments a bit. (Or, hell, he can go ahead and arrange a marriage for her; that’d be a curious scene. Whatever.) Because otherwise, she’s limited to the most casual and distant relationships possible.

Truth be told, she’s more than a little afraid of the idea. She feels stretched thin as it is, what with family obligations, Aryk and Rien, and the net of interlocking political, economic, and social forces she is beginning to weave around herself. How can she reasonably add a lover to that? What will she have left to give? (My answer: Not much, so anybody seriously interested in her had better be prepared to shoulder the lion’s share of caretaking and sacrifice. Rennie is a sweet and lovely girl, but she’s extremely high-maintenance.)

She’ll have to get a grip, though, because Rien is hardly the first to succumb to little Jenny-Wren’s undeniable charm. (I was hoping I could manage to make her charming, and I seem to have succeeded. Role-playing point for me; in real life I’m not charming in the slightest.) Indeed, she’s practically had to beat indefatigable Aryk off with a stick, though she finally seems to have got through to him that there’s more to women than sex.

(Yes, Dragonhunt is a sexist world, but a consciously sexist one, which makes considerable difference. Nobody woofs when I fight the system, whether through Rennie’s patient glass-ceiling-breaking competence or Sabra’s acid-tongued critique. I find the critique experience useful, in fact.)

A lot of Renate’s problem is that she has a very distorted perspective on herself, owing to the all-or-nothing thinking typical of late adolescents. Because she’s not a paragon of beauty, strength, or intelligence, she ignores her very real charm, skill, and wit. She lets her mistakes fill her vision to the exclusion of all else (and, oh, do I remember this from when I was her age!); she hasn’t developed the mature realization that mistakes are universal and resilience is what counts in the end. Godfrey knows this well, and has tried to explain it to her, but we all learn these things in our own time.

The telling blow? Everyone around her is easier on her than she is, recognizing that her mistakes are neither fatal nor irredeemable, and her correct decisions outnumber them anyway. She will, I think, learn to forgive herself; indeed, she must, or her stern self-criticism will spiral into a paralysis of self-loathing.

This is, however, something a lover might perhaps be best-placed to teach her. We shall see.

Our Heroes are in a bit of a spot.

With an ugly gang war brewing (thanks to their “ally” from the dragondom next door), Our Heroes heard that the local chieftain of the foreign mafia were about to do a dead-drop and pickup of something apparently rather important in a local park.

So of course they went to try to disrupt it, despite the fearsome (and well-earned) reputation of the chieftain’s bodyguard. Simply put: said bodyguard can take us all out en masse and not break a sweat.

The important thing turns out to be a small rock of magical qualities. We have it—but chieftain and bodyguard just popped up and eliminated our planned escape route. You know you’re in trouble when the GM says, “Get out of this without any deaths and I’ll call it a win.”

But. I have a plan. A simple plan. A brilliant plan. A plan that is brilliant because it is simple. And I don’t have to jigger the setup in the slightest to make this plan work: all its components were explicitly mentioned by the GM himself. (And since the GM reads this weblog, you get no details of this simple, brilliant plan until we put it into action next week.)

The GM can in fact spoil it by fiat, but I don’t think he will. Still, because no plan ever goes unspoiled in the Dragonhunt, I have an emergency backup plan too. I don’t much like it, though: it’s brittle, backfire-prone, and could put my little Rennie in a horridly distasteful situation. So my money’s on the first plan.

So, let’s see… when we left Renate, she’d just taken her friends dancing.

(The whole thing about dancing… okay, let me try to explain in brief. Rien’s enigma is his alter ego, nicknamed “Trancey,” who comes to the fore to kick butt and take names whenever Rien’s in trouble. Rien has reason to loathe Trancey, not least because he can’t control or even remember what Trancey does, but he can’t do away with Trancey because he has few usable defense skills of his own. On dancing night, Trancey treated Renate to a spectacular dance-floor turn, and somehow managed to let Rien remember the whole thing. Rien was most thrilled.)

The struggle to keep the Lan’yarian mafia (known as the Ruido Grande) out of Ilium has turned into a several-front war. On the one hand, we have the Thieves’ Guild trying to keep its anti-Lan’yarian elements from getting assassinated. On the other hand, we have the Black Sheep gang trying to hold back the Toy Soldiers gang, which has gone over to the enemy in a major way. On the third hand, we have the Cosmic Arrows and Ultra Box gangs, the former being swayed by a flashy Ruido Grande swordsman willing to teach them some tricks, the latter being proselytized by Ruido-Grande-affiliated demon missionaries.

So Renate’s been kinda busy, the last few days.

Two assassinations have been prevented. Rien and a chance-met new ally are trying to bring the Cosmic Arrows down a few pegs. Aryk, along with his old seminary buddies, is doing a bit of Ultra Box proselytization. This involved a rap competition that was absolutely, positively, laugh-till-your-lungs-bleed funny. (It also showed that Aryk has a long way to go to understand the workings of privilege, not that that’s surprising.)

And Renate had to go beg for some time from the Black Sheep’s leader, a nouveau-titled vampire in negotiations with the Ruido Grande. (Which led to an absolutely priceless aside from the GM: “I’m going to get a vampiress to help me fight a gang war and I haven’t a THING to wear!”)

Current situation: The Black Sheep are rampaging against both the Toy Soldiers and the Ultra Box; Renate may have to try to rein them in, as their leader insisted upon same. Exactly where the seminarians stand with respect to the demon missionaries isn’t quite clear, nor do we know what’s happened with the Cosmic Arrows. Aside from preventing another assassination, the Thieves’ Guild has been quiet. And Renate has to present two victories to the Black Sheep’s leader within a week if the Sheep are to keep fighting—if the Sheep do not decide to dump their leader, as a tantalizing rumor has it they are considering.

On tap: regrouping and figuring out where our efforts are best placed next.

On a personal level, Renate is deeply uncomfortable with the ethics of all this. She doesn’t like working with gangs and grifters, though she admits that they have been the sole organized opposition to the Ruido Grande’s conquest, and she knows full well that they cannot be eliminated without serious social upheaval. Unbeknownst to her, the Thieves’ Guild has paid her and her allies for the assassination preventions; when she does find out, her share of the money will be returned.

There may be a ray of hope in the Black Sheep’s defection; that remains to be seen. In the main, though, Renate is planning with a quaking heart to put the whole ugly story in front of the Ilium public via her contacts in the newspaper world—and that done, she’ll take her lumps for her part in the entire mess.

On the plus side, Renate managed to find Rien/Trancey a valuable new friend. Ren is rather intimidated by Rien/Trancey, though being a loyal little soul, she does her best. The mere strangeness of it is bad enough, though in her country-girl way she recognizes that the entire world is pretty gosh-darned strange and why should Rien/Trancey be any different? But his troubles feel a little overwhelming at times, so she’s very pleased to have found a way to share them with someone else.