thread: 2005-03-15 : Cross-gender Play
On 2005-03-16, Rafial wrote:
Little Women (check), LHotP (check), missed Anne of Green Gables. I also much preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys (although Tom Swift beat them both).
My grade school/high school experience was almost exclusively male players, but we included female characters. Initially, since there were so few of us, and we were playing modules typically written for "5-8 characters of xth level" we all ran stables of characters. They were basically pawns, and we divvied them up pretty evenly between male and female, but that made no nevermind, because gender was not on the table, everybody was just there to swing a sword/cast a spell.
In late high school when we started doing the 1 player/1 PC thing, I would often play females, sometimes by choice, and several times by GM request, because the other male players wouldn't.
These days I continue to play both genders as the mood takes me. My decision process as far as I can tell is deciding "which stereotype that fits the agreed upon genre/situation do I want to play today" and then going with the gender that best fits that stereotype.
The most interesting insight I got while thinking about my reply for this thread was that in hindsight, those characters that stand out the most in my memory tend to be majority female.
