So, the whole gender influencing roleplaying and gameplay styles is a painful cliche exemplified by Sara Felton from Knights of the Dinner Table. (Although, supposedly Sara is based on Jolly's wife, who from her photo *looks* like she might be one of those character-interested players...) There's probably been a thread about it before. But, I wanna tell a story in which the cliches were totally exemplified by me (the male player) and two females who were playing. Don't worry, I'll tie it into Shadowrun.

So, first, The Story:
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A friend of mine, knowing my love for 1st edition D&D and the orientalist cheesefest known as Oriental Adventures, ran a one-shot 1st edition D&D game for me. I was using an overpowered Oriental Adventures sohei, and we were all using 1st level characters. Because it was 1st edition D&D we actually rolled up 6 characters apiece, a la a Paranoia 6 pack, because we accepted that there might be PC blood flowing tonight.

Anyway, we start the adventure and the GM, in the spirit of 1st edition, is letting the dice fall where they may regarding weather conditions and encounters and so forth. But, like a good GM, he dosen't just name the monsters, but rather describes them without naming them.

So me, the male player, is classifying each monster in my mind as its entry in the D&D rulebooks and as a first level character my uniform response to most encounters is, "I run away." The women, however, are getting all interested in the creatures based on their description and are trying to see how they react and all this kind of flavorful character based stuff.

The GM, to his immense credit, didn't just make the monsters eat everyone, but rather had them react to the characters in interesting ways, which actually made for a more interesting game. But my character was running away the whooooole time.

The kicker was when in a dungeon setting the party encountered some zombies. He described the walking corpses so vividly that the women's characters were, like, shying away in revulsion. (He was really a terrific GM.) Of course, I thought, "FINALLY! Something I can kill!", and my character leapt forward like a hungry toddler to a plate of spaghetti.

So, the moral of this story: REAL MEN ROLL PLAY! RAAAHHHH!!!
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The Shadowrun connection:

I've noticed that in Shadowrun novels, generally speaking, novels about downtrodden Barrens kids becoming shamans or diffident teenage deckers becoming involved in something dangerous with a group of pros and manages to make it seem to be written more by female authors. On the other hand, high-powered troll fests with vampires and lesbian physads and dual wielded SMGs seem to be written more often by male authors. The same trend, see, but in even more comical contrast.

As a result, I've decided to write a short story representing what would happen if a female writer ever collaborated with a male writer.

Barrens kid: Man, my life is hard. I'm sure suffering. But I'm plucky.
*a team of shadowrunners erupt from the ground, wailing on guitars. Miniguns are slung on their backs and belts of ammo criss cross across their torsos in a stylish Vietnam War fashion*
Sammie: All my delta grade cyberware made it easier for me to erupt from the ground. I, uh, know kung fu, also. For when I shoot so many ninjas with my minigun that I run out of ammo.
Physad: I'm a lesbian elf!
Decker: I actually suck at combat, but I take advantage of the minigun's high rate of fire and the Cannon Companion suppressive fire rules to help the team. And to compensate for my lack of action hero-ness, I automatically win in the matrix.
Barrens kid: I also want to care for my baby brother, who is the last memory of my dear passed away mother. Oh my, what's this? I've been chosen by Cat. Yay, I'm a shaman! How comforting! I draw strength and faith from my totem.
Sammie: GEEK THE MAGE!
Physad: Hey cutie, I'm a lesbian!
Decker: I'LL NEVER GET WOMEN IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE BECAUSE I USE COMPUTERS! RAAH, FIRE MINIGUN IN RAGE!
Barrens kid: Nooo, I don't know how to cast invisibility or Physical Barrier or any of that crap because according to storyline I wouldn't have any reason to have any of these tools yet. But I can't die now, I have so much character development to undergo. Quick, I must appeal to the storyline!
Shadowrunners, in unison: WE HAVE A BIG KARMA POOL! REROLL FAILURES! REROLL FAILURES!
Barrens kid: Hmm, multiple hits for D damage, and I have Body 2 and Karma 1. *explodes into an unappetizing blend of Cat shaman goulash and swordfish mustardball*
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Gender examined:

More generally, when reading fiction, I feel like in many cases I can sort of guess whether the author was male or female. It's hard to put my finger on it, and it's more of a gut feeling, but I'll try to characterize it. The female authors tend to have characters who are, well, nicer. You read about them, and you like them more. You feel more like if they were your friends you'd feel good having lunch with them.

I guess a good example of this would be the Ellis Peters character Brother Cadfael. Brother Cadfael is a medieval benedictine monk in England who solves mysteries using forensics. He's supposed to be this rugged badass veteran of the Crusades who has pwned countless people in battle before having his fill of violence and becoming a monk.

So, he could have been written in a number of ways. He could have been emotionally distant from everyone due to trauma. He could have been a juggernaut of visceral desperation, kind of like Howard's Conan. But instead he's at peace with himself, nice to people, helps young lovers escape, benevolent, and only clever and badass when he needs to be. So, like, if he were your neighbor, you'd feel warm and fuzzy about him, which wouldn't be the case with someone like Howard's Conan. A lot of times, when reading about male characters created by female authors, I find them to be ever so slighly on the effeminite side.

On the other hand, I think that male writers are more likely to be "turned on" by rugged badassery. Just look at the portrayal of Conan by John Milius in the film "Conan The Barbarian"; Milius was inspired by Zen-inspired ideals of rugged and individualistic martial strength. Conan, Rambo, and Dirty Harry appeal strongly to the imagination because of their combination of physical dangerousness but also mental fortitude in the face of danger or adversity. These are the characteristics that are articulated for these characters by the storyline the most. At the same time, there's nothing warm and fuzzy about any of these characters. They don't help young lovers escape, and if they were your neighbor they probably wouldn't be very comfortable dinner guests.

If you think about it, it's absolutely roll playing versus role playing. Cadfael presumably has really big stats because of the heaps of people he pwned during the crusades but he dosen't spend that time actually rolling his combat skills. Instead, he spends most of his time on inter-character interactions that largely wouldn't require dice rolls. In contrast, Dirty Harry spends a huge amount of time making Intimidate and Pistols (signature .44 magnum) checks.

This, of course, begs a question. Perhaps "roll playing" is not correctly conceptualized as an absence of character development. Perhaps "roll playing" is rather the representation of a certain masculine aspect of our collective cultural mythology, as portrayed in popular films and novels. Many people look down on straight up "roll playing", but is it really right to look down upon a certain archetypal cultural construct? Do we look down on the myths of Hercules because they're basically about him being big and strong, and say that the myth about Persephone is better and more correct because it has a lot of emotion but not a whole lot of combat rolls?

Perhaps "roll playing", which I define as munchkinization and systematic statistical analysis of in-game possibilities to chose the character's action, can be seen as the persuit of the perfect representation of a rugged masculine character. It's easy to *say* that your character is being rugged and tough, but how can your character truly be rugged and tough compared to all the other characters who were created with the same amount of resources? Perhaps you refine the rugged toughness of your character to a higher level of perfection through careful management of statistics, so as to portray the archetypal Clint Eastwood style hero better than the other people at the table are doing. And so, perhaps "roll playing" is not the absence of character development, but rather the refinement and perfection in the portrayal of one character type.

Here is an example. Suppose that in a role playing game I want to portray the hero of the Illiad, Odysseus. Odysseus was supposed to be a pretty powerful hero, but he was also supposed to be cunning, sly, and ruthless towards his enemies. So, in order to portray Odysseus, I first munch out in chargen to make him as powerful as possible. Next, any time my character makes an in-game decision, I have Odysseus make the best possible choice at any given time because I statistically analyze all possible outcomes. Am I not portraying Odysseus better than if he were only of average strength and made typical (but not optimal) decisions?

I maintain that roll-playing, done to a systematic and painstaking extreme, is anything but the absence of a developed character. Rather, it is the path to the refinement of the perfect portrayal of one part of our archetypal popular culture mythology.

But the thing is, the quiet, badass guy can be so boring. You can be badass, but at least make him interesting. Like, if you're mugged, instead of shooting the guy and calling him "punk" in an unplaceable accent, be a shaman and levitate him into the air for, like, 70 feet and drop him while chewing disinterestedly on an apple. Then walk away. Plus, the perfect portrayal of a ubiquitous stereotype is so fucking boring, period.

one thing i've been pondering trying is making archtypical macho-type characters--the reclusive, badass loner; the maniac combat monster, etcetera--and playing them 'realistically'. that is to say, playing out the consequences of the faults that make them what they are. the reclusive, badass loner (eg, Rambo/Cobra/your choice of almost any other Sly role), for instance--the thing about being a reclusive loner is that people think you're weird, and they don't like you. saving the world is not going to change that. the chicks who have rejected you your entire life for being a freak who sits at home in the dark and cleans your guns are not going to suddenly throw themselves at you because you saved one of them from the bad guys. they're going to want to continue living their normal, integrated-into-society life, and you're going to want to go back to your guns. it's not romantic, it sucks.

It's cyberpunk.

Unless you have the whole "bad boy" cliche down. Then that might work. Then the GM kills you for imitating Wolverine like a tool.

One thing I miss about CP 2020 is the concept of cyberpsychosis. The disassociative effects of man as he becomes machine. It doesn't work so well in SR because of the magic aspect.

I had a really fun to play street sam character not long back who had the associated personality flaws. The whole point of the character was that he'd gone so far into the chrome and the warrior mindset that he no longer felt human. He couldn't relate to other people and saw everything in tactical terms. It sucked for a social life. I never got to play it out to the end, but that was a character that really needed to die a suitable death to feel complete, since that's pretty much what the point of the character was.

Heh. He did chip etiquette. It almost made up for the fact that he had 0.1 essence remaining. Almost.

The problem with trying to be a badass character by min-maxing your stats is that it isn't enough. So many poor roleplayers want to play a tough character, but their character gets chewed up and spit out by the first adventure. Why? Because you need more than numbers. You also need tactics. That's what separates the powergamers from the hapless munchkins.

Take the example of Hercules. Big, tough guy and all, but if you read through the labors of Hercules, you realize that he was also a pretty sharp cookie, too. A lot of the labors were designed to be impossible to complete purely by brute strength. A monster that grows two heads every time you cut one off? A filthy stable for a huge herd of horses, and you have to clean it? Hercules uses cunning and even lateral thinking to get by his challenges.

And if the player gets as successfully wild and lecherous as Hercules, you get some great tabletop stories.

Agreed. There's also a matter of attitude. One of my favorite digressions by Adam Corrola was about The Fast And The Furious (which he calls Lawrence of Arabia for 'tards) and Vin Diesel's line, "I live my life a quarter mile at a time" to emphasize his badass credentials. The problem is, real "badass" people don't talk like that. It's what losers think they sound like (hence its inclusion in the aformentioned cinematic abortion). I know a guy who was in Iraq and who would occassionally run into SpecFor. He described them as, "Boring 40 year-old guys who are better than you at everything."

You watch Adam Corolla? Doesn't he suck most of the time between random bouts of brilliance?

This was like four years ago on Loveline.

Rollplaying and roleplaying are notmutually exclusive. You can have very well devolped munchkins. Conan himself is a brilliant example of this. Yes, he was a multiclassed fighter/thief Nietzcheian overbarbarian but he had a great deal of brilliant character devolpment. He was someone that he could easily understand and relate to, not an aloof superperson.

Likewise, the character of Teir Anasazi from Andromeda was a real badass with a great deal of good character devopment and personality up untill he died like an idiot due to bad writing.

My personal favorate roleplayed rollplayer is Chiun from The Destroyer series.

Chiun is, quite frankly, invincible. His decades of training in the ways of Sinanju allow him to move faster than the human eye can see and decapitate people with his unsusally long fingernails. He possesses absurd strength, infinite cunning, tactical and stratigic genius, the ability to bring a women to sexual fulfillment in 27-52 steps( although the 52 step program is fatal to most women and usually only lesbians require more than 12).

But the great thing about Chiun is that he knows how superior he is to everyone else and he acts like it. He is absurdly and unabashedly racist, misogynist, and every other -ist you can possiby think of. It isn't that he is a hatemonger, he simply knows that everyone else is inferior and has a logicaly defined heirarchy or inferiority that places himself at the top. Blacks are inferior to Asians, other Asians are inferior to Koreans, other Koreans are inferior to the people of Sinanju and the citizens of Sinanju are inferior to him. Whites are, of course, inferior to everyone and women are inferior to men. Catholics (and Christians in general) are just poor misguided fools. That his adpoted son and heir is both White and Catholic brings him no end of shame.

His superiority also results in some interesting quirks. He refers to his employeer as the Emperor of the United States because it is beneeth him to work for a mear beaurucrat. He doesn't hesitate to kill people for singing too loud, disturbing him during his soaps, or any number of minor annoyances. His banter with Remo is outstanding.

My experience with female role players runs to about 6 individuals. From those 2 where overly aggressive, 2 where wanting to F*** everything that moved and then blow stuff away and one was a borderline munchkin. Only one had a hint of the expected high character interaction tendency and then not more so than most mail gamers.

The sample size is not has big as it could be but it would suggest that the females are lovey dovey role-players is a myth.

Edward

Agreed, although I don't recall ever meeting any "fuck everything that moves" players. Other than that, I've met all kinds.

Chiun kinda IS a joke, though.

Wounded Ronin: I think you're on to something with the connection between munchkinism and pop-cultural stereotypes. Interesting point. Your conclutions about how gender figures into this are screwed up though. Were ever you stand on the debate about the differences between men and women, you have to realize that level of generalization is just pointless. How do people keep thinking these things are true? Surely just knowing and speaking to different women will quickly enough prove that they're not all sensitive and weak.

Did he play Wolverine seriously, as in, a not-making-fun-of-him way?

After reading the first entery, i though tot my self.

What happenes when a Gay feller who is the bitch in the duo writes a story?

My experiance with female rpg-players is also quiet small, since there are not many of them in my FoF-Network, too (I´ve got the impression that the ratio is higher in WOD, but I don´t play this stuff, so..). 9 all together in some 15 years.

Most of them fell in one of 2 categories. Either the aggressive or the non-participating.
I had only one female gm, just for 3-4 sessions, and that was when i just started rpg, at the age of 11 or so, and she was 20 or something, the older sister of my buddy and quiet experienced in rpg as fare as I could tell at that time, but I´m really not capabel of judging the performence now.
One girl participated actively without being overtly aggressive, she was the sole exception.
1 or 2 were "killer-brides" and 1 was kind of pc-rpg-like in style (but was no pc-gamer to my knowledge and it was befor the advent and great popularity of mmorpg), mostly interested in loot.
The other 5 were quiet unaggressive and more or less non-participating in general.

However, 2/3 of them were new to rpg (and most others probably weren´t regular gamers, too), which tends to corresponds with these two types of play in general.

I can't help thinking that by far the smartest, most challenging GM I've ever had is a woman. I wouldn't call her sadistic (not like I am, anyway), but she has no qualms about throwing horrible things at PCs as part of the run, be it an army of shedim or a half-dozen cyberzombies.

My limited experience with women and RPG's prompted me to coin the phrase, "Never trust a chick that goes for the battle-axe."

I've played with 4 women, 1 was over zealous in her desire to prove she was one of the guys, to the dtrement of everyone's game, she caused many a TPK through foolishness.
The 2nd thought the entire adventure, even against mobs of slavering ghould hell bent on devouring your flesh should be solved with talking and hugs.

The Third felt every thing must die horribly in the first 5 minutes of the game through explosives.

The fourth just sorta hid in the background and didn't do anything unless the GM specifically adressed her and only then he had to prompt her to make an action.

I've played with two women long enough to have an opinion of them. The first was pretty much an observer, standing back and easily frustrated when she was expected to act (but still seemed to enjoy the games). She's gotten better with practice, although her characters are still a bit wooden. The second was fascinated by the world, character interactions, describing herself and her actions to others, etc. SHe didn't shrug away from combat or death, and actually took quite a liking to it, but DID avoid numbers and long-term planning (so never got too into SR, unfortunately, which is heavy on both). She loved Arcology Shutdown because no planning was involved and I made all dice rolls, etc. behind the scenes

Or maybe I'm just sick of bullshit. Nah...

Or maybe I think it would be a waste of mfb's time to mock and point out the weaknesses of lame characters. It'd be as useful to his time as watching 99% of all action movies.

I think this thread is drifting to the point I was about to make which is, tongue-in-cheekness aside, I think it's more about the individual, rather than about the gender, or even being a minority in a gender.

As someone pointed out, I think most of the developed "Barren-baby" characters in Shadowrun canon have come from the creative "womb" of male authors.

Also just by looking at all these "these are what the females from my group do" stories, we can see their actions (or inactions) are the same types of personality traits we see just as often from male players.

So I think we can generalize the females in this manner. There are two types: those that game with us, and those that don't.

I will give you props, Ronin, for a relatively entertaining post (I definately got my money's worth), but it really isn't much more than that.

@mintcar

First off, while I´m convinced that there are genderbased differences in human behaviour in general (of which there is statistical proof), this does in no way mean, that every woman would do so-and-so, while every man would do somhow-different in exactly the same way. There is a large deviation from the middle and the groups are largely overlapping, but there are significant differences.

While you are probably right, that the excange of singular anecdotes does not even aproximately show how the real situation may look, it´s at least interesting, which is, why I´m on this forum. And it may even show a trend.

Now how would such knowledge be of any use?
Well, my personal experiance was, that tere are differences in first-session players concerning gender. It was generally harder for me as a gm, to integrate female players into the game and I´m interested, if others had the same experiance and how they coped with it. If most female players have another style as most males have, than a gm would probably have to take that into account, to kreate a gameenvironment, that does serve these different preferences. While this can easily be done on an individual basis once you know the style of a female player, you don´t have this previlege on the first to n´th encounter and need to have a working hypothesis.
The simplistic workinghypothesis "male and female players do react with a given action to the same statistical probability" has not worked out very well for me.

This touches the greater topic of stereotypes, which, while they were often misused are only workinghypothesis for the interaction with foraign persons. It is bad to try and enforce those stereotypes on everyone or use them degrade people, but they are in some cases usefull as a starting point. I.e. if you are going to buy a birthdaypresent for a child you do not know and have no chance to consult anyone, it is probably a good thing to start with the gender of the kid. A boy will probably not like a Malibou Stacy, whereeas a girl is less likely to enjoy playing with a Transformer-Cannon. This does not mean, that no girl on the planet will ever want to play with a Weapon-Robot-Toy, but I´d think it´d be good advice, not to choose this in the above situation with the child being female.

So fare, for short..

Concerning geneder, it is very important to seperate gender roles from gender identity and biological sex.

Gender roles are purely social constructs and they vary greatly from social group to social group.
Gender identity is a psycological construct influanced by both society and biology. Contrary to popular belief, it is a spectrum rather than simply one or another.
Biological sex is a set of physical, genetic, and hormonal characteristics that also runs a wide spectrum and cannot easily be clasified.

For our purposes here, gender roles are by far the most important topic, although the others can't be ignored.

An individual who grows up in a social group will devolp an understanding of gender roles that is normative to that social group. An individual will then accept and internalize these roles based on the individual's gender identity. Of course, this is more complex than I make it out to be. There are always several social groups vying for phycological control of an individual so no one will perfectly conform to a single set of gender roles.

In regard to the doll vs giant transforming robot issue, it is true that in traditional western society a girl will prefer a doll and a boy will prefer a giant robot, more times than not. However, that is simply due to the gender roles that western society had devolped. The opposite would be true in a culture that considered dolls to be masculine and giant transforming robots to be feminine.

Today, gender roles are less rigidly defined and one finds a great deal of variation between otherwise similar subgroups and between individuals. However, the most basic gender expications within a culture are very difficult to change so there are still some things that are to be expected.

the only common thread i can find that all female players have in common is that i can't accurately guess what type of character they'll play. with guys, i'm usually pretty good at figuring out ahead of time the general type of char they'll play--i've never been surprised, at any rate. with chicks, i'm always wrong. i'll have one pegged as a hardcore beat-em-up fighter type, and she'll play a priestess of the love goddess. i'll have another pegged as a social butterfly type, and she picks a half-goat archer. like, wow.

As for female roleplayers: They should be forbidden!

With females comes the "All talk, no fight" style of RPG and it's "We're off to lala Land with the feys and the mages and the lil hairy footed thiefs" Not to mention "Roleplaying Challenges" like misunderstood dark elves and underaged natives in an adventurers group

Gimme an old fashioned all male, "Let's kill Orks because they are Orks" group anytime! Rock and Roll and belt fed weapons!

Same with female authors. I have yet to read one who is worth the price of a used book. There are no female Howards, Webers, Pournelles or Heinleins. Females just can't do that.

HAHAHAHA

Oh, man. That made my day. Nice one.

Heheh
I can't help but laugh at the imagery of the ubermensch sitting alone crying and polishing his guns. 'course if he ever goes postal, I'm running for the hills.

Tom Dowd made a great joke about this in FoF.

Being a sulking ubermench ellicits a certain nurturing response in some people. The good old "I'm tough on the outside because I'm really soft on the inside and I don't want to get hurt" sterotype plays into certain relationship fantasies as well. The person who is withdrawn or abnoxious is less likely to stray in a commited relationship.

Of course, it is possible for the ubermench to be an arrogant jerk antagonist character rather than a tough but sensitive protagnist and it is possible for the ubermench to walk the line between these two.

The former, the arragoant jerk antagonist, natrually gets more dates because Chicks Dig Jerks. The latter who can be a bitter hardcore arrogant jerk on the outside but is really a creamy sweet sensitive guy on the inside hs the best chance at a longlasting relationship of all the hardcore ubermench characters.