By now you have figured out that the post isn’t quite what you thought. I was just wondering how many suffer from Tomb Raider Syndrome. You know, dudes who by choice prefer to play hot chicks and vice versa.

What brought this on was the fact that I noticed that my 10 year old daughter usually plays muscle bound guys on Guild Wars and my 7 year old son plays big breasted, scantily clad women on the same. ( I have no problem with either considering I usually do the same.) In SR I usually play men but have played women in AD&D and Vampire the Masquerade.

I was just wondering what percentage did the same.

I very rarely play "chipped beef" characters (Bulldog is very much an exception in my RP characters) but I have given up on playing chicks. I have noted that most males play females as tough-ass hookers with Hugh Jass guns, as I did, and I felt that if I can't take care of biz RPing females in any depth then I should get out of the game.

Go big or go home, I always say.

I've played characters of both genders. Stat-wise, there usually isn't too much difference. I prefer the roleplaying and combat parts of the game to the planning, legwork, and infiltration parts of the game, so my characters accordingly tend to be combat-oriented types with some face skills. Generally, I take the time to go through either the 20 questions, or Bull's 50+ questions, so none of them are really one-note stereotypes.

i don't like playing female, i just can't get into the role . .

It's easy. Whenever your asked to make a decision, vacillate until someone makes it for you. And randomly start an argument 25% of the time....

[ducks]

Or think of what you would do normally and do exactly the opposite.

[hides behind chair]

we have one big burly guy, all man, and he's allways playing female . . elven bitch, female combat monkey, all dead sexy with varying degrees of charisma . . and yes, he does exactly that . . know what's worse? the two times we had women game with us, THEY did EXACTLY the same, no matter what kind of character they were playing . .

While I create more male characters, they always seem to die, so I end up spending more time on my female characters. Not really an issue, as my favorite characters are female, it just seems a bit odd.

I've tried playing female characters in the past, but I could never really figure out how to play them any differently from my male characters, so generally now I just stick with male.

You know I think one of the more fascinating characters a friend of mine played was a Tom of Finland beefcake. There was a housing shortage so he paid rent for a condo the rest crashed at by the inch with his equally beefcake landlord.

Some guys play what are called wank characters. They have to be Penthouse centerfolds, who just happen to be in whatever business they are in. There are also those who wish to enact their body fantasies. Let's face it not every guy can afford to look like Brad Pitt.

Heh, playing a woman would be funny methinks.
"Oh, a run? is it tuesday? I'm sorry, I can't tonight, I have a headache"

I'm not a big meaty guy, but I play both male and female, buff and not buff, with a fairly even distribution.

Heh.

I have a hard time playing male characters - they always turn out really two dimensional (or a copy of a TV character). The exception to this is when I'm GMing - I don't know why that is.

- Scope

You know my wife???

Several others have said it previously, and I agree. Since I GM almost exclusively, I tend to play the character that's needed. Certainly I have those characatures of the hyper-male/female architypes and I play them that way, but ONLY when that kind of character is called for.

For those few times I do get to play, gender tends to be the last thing I come up with. I start with a backstory (kind of a narrative 20+ questions), and then for finishing touches I decide gender, race, ethnicity, height, weight, etc.

Mark

Crizh just tried to randomly start an argument. Ergo, crizh defines herself as a woman.

As someone primarily trapped in GM land, I get to play all genders. I think it's roughly balanced though I do have a couple of favourite female NPCs who perhaps fall into the deadly beauty category. The Porcelain Doll is one of them and that character is floating around here somewhere. I've always been attracted to competent and vaguely aggressive women, I don't know why. Has that leaked through into a couple of characters? Possibly a little, hard to say, but they're definitely not caricatures. The Porcelain Doll in particular has a very involved and realistic background and she's far from a "smoking hot babe" by most people's standards given her predilection for self-mutilation. Girls without lips tend not to be very kissable (no offence meant to any girls without lips reading this). Haze, another female character, is literally smoking hot as she's something of a fire mage, and she is beautiful, but she's also partly designed as a foil to male PCs.

Having said all that though, Shadowrun is a role-playing game for people to experience being another person in another life. If some players wish to indulge themselves in being that which they idolise, I don't normally have a problem with that, I just push them to round the character out a little bit before play.

Actually I play a sort of nerdy, needs a little more sunlight Chaos Mage. He's sort of plain... not ugly enough to stop clocks, but not winning any Mr. Universe Pageants any time soon... AKA normal. While on a run he will run a skin for his cybereyes that makes them a non-descript brown. If I had the Essence available, I would get cyber-hair... just to make hiding easier.

I know that a lot of people in Shadowrun can be "beautiful" because of surgery, but honestly... why would a runner bother? Being a Playmate smoking hot elf chick is just asking: "Yes, <insert Corp name of Choice>, please remember my face because I want your goon squads to come over to my home and do horrible, cruel, evil things to me. I really enjoy that!" You want your runners to be plain john/jane does that don't stand out at all. Anything else is just asking for it.

I too am in ref land, so I have to play both genders. I think I do quite well with the female pyche in my limited way. I am however a ROLEplayer so have never felt I could get far enough into a female characters pychology to do a PC justice.
I always felt my attempt would be mildly offensive to women kind and a critique on my own conceptions.

MY female characters tend to be substantially less inhibited than my male characters. My male characters tend to be cold professionals, idealistic dragonslayers, or down-to-earth antiheroes. While I have cold professional, idealistic dragonslayer, and down-to-earth antihero female characters I also have female characters who are sadists, thrill-killers, rapists, pedophiles, slave traders, and other unsavory things - and incestuous lesbian gilled catgirls. They aren't all hot, however. Some of them are middle aged and only moderately attractive.
After reading a blog that disturbingly combined radical feminism of the 'all heterosexual sex is rape' variety with casual and cavalier racism of the 'miscegenation is evil' variety , I'm considering creating a literal femnazi character who believes that Humanis and Alamos 40K aren't racist enough, laments the end of skin-color discrimination, and plans to turn the world into a paradise 'womyn' by killing all males and all non-human non-'Aryan' females.

would not live long in any game i play in . . i'D either show her the difference between mutual consentual sex and rape and THEN kill or or just plain out kill her . . i don't deal particularly well with any kind of extremists and other crazy personas . .

Hmm that sounds interesting.

I play both sexes, thugzillas and not thugzillas, but my females tend not be be thugzillas. I rarely play a straight up Samurai, those not much fun for me.

I like to play the unusual or fringe characters not because they gain me vast amounts of perks/advantages but for the challenge of getting into that characters head.

WMS

I think the tendency in videogames has more to do with that fact that you're generally staring at the characters rear the whole time you play.

This is an Administrative Posting.

While most of the material in this thread seems to be intended in jest and good humor, please remember the Dumpshock Terms of Service.

Many of the postings here are blatantly sexist. Please cease such postings.

HOW DO ROLE PLAY FEMALE!!???!!!!!!

I gm alot so i play alot of females (alot of times with a southern accent for some reason) but as a pc i only played one female, but i did play her for a long time. She was a gruff dwarf chick with a chip on her shoulder (low charisma) but by no means was she some super violent lesbian who screamed if a man got near her. She even got married to another player after he saved her life (it was more like a deal; he wanted to marry and she wanted to live). I don't most people can play out of the gender, being that lots of people have trouble playing out of their personality. The guys who play girls always seem to be a really hot lesbian elf. As a gm i have men harass them all the time, letting them feel how its like to be a woman in a male dominated profession. Alot of times they end of changing chars because they can't live out there fetish fantasy.

[grovelling]

Sorry, I was just joking...

[/grovelling]

I am ashamed to admit that my first ever SR1 character was a female lesbian. In my defence at the time that was an original idea and she was actually based on what I thought, at the time, was an accurate fictional representation of a lesbian character, Claudia Christian's 'Tuesday' in the massively obscure 'Never on Tuesday.'

I oscillate wildly between playing male and female characters, to the extent that Edinburgh Uni's role-playing society once voted me 'Person of the least definitive gender', however I find in most RPG's that combat and adventuring overwhelm the game to such an extent that there is no real opportunity to role-play any clear difference between characters of differing genders.

That's actually a pretty interesting idea, but don't you think in Shadowrun that sort of discrimination would be overshadowed by anti-meta discrimination?

I'm female in rl and never saw a point in playing a male character.

My view of the tally shows 36 votes cast (13, 0, 20, 1, 0, 2), but says 41 were cast. What's up?

Oh... (reddened face) I just figured out null votes. Sorry for the wasted airspace.

Would I be defined as a male lesbian, I wonder? Okay - sorry, I'll stop teasing now.



There's no real reason that you should. It's just that there's no great reason why you shouldn't either.

I think the reason some male players go for hot lesbian characters is, just to clarify, because they are (a) straight and (b) slightly idolise women. Put the two together and you get someone who wants to play their idealised person and retain their own sexuality. You see a similar psychological pattern in some (most?) transvestites and similarly, you get the same exaggerated - typically male - ideal of what a woman actually is, as well.

Note, that by drawing a parallel with transvestism, I am in no way trying to say there's anything wrong with male players wanting to play an attractive female character. I'm just exploring what I think is the common reason for it. The main thing is that everyone has fun. As to whether we see the same thing in reverse with female players, I don't have a wide enough experience to say, though I have had several female players (all of them, actually) explicitly specifying how physically attractive their female characters are.

But are you saying there is something wrong with Transvestites?
I don't think I'll ever play a female character, seeing as I wouldn't know how to really. Besides being a stereo-type. And if I would give it a serious go I would over-think it and make myself look bad, and it would become to hard anyways.

"Edit"
Oh yeah, I'm a lesbian. Male. I like woman.

If you put it that way, what's the point of playing anything you're not?

you have to see that from her angle . . if you were a good looking woman, would you want to be a man? O.o
we play things we are not because we WANT to be those things . . i don't wanna be a woman, so i don't play female characters, that simple . .
i wish i were a troll and did not just act like one, so i tend to play those ^^

Unintentionally, I think I just did. I stressed that I wasn't saying there was something wrong with RP'ing an idealised member of the other gender when I said it could have a common cause with transvestism because I imagined most people that did RP such a character of the opposite gender would consider there to be something wrong with transvestism and feel slighted. But in trying to reassure no offence was meant with the comparison, I unintentionally aligned myself with a negative view of transvestism.

Is there something wrong with transvestites? Well I think on principle it's a good thing to be happy with who you are. Depending on someones motivations for transvestism, it may or may not indicate a deep dissatisfaction with who they are and that sounds like a problem to me. But I see no reason to be negative toward anyone who does and I've only ever met one so what is true of one may not be true of another.



Perhaps because good looking women can be just as complicated as anyone else?

Khadim.

trickery!

I usually play more women than men, last serious D&D campaign I played in not only was I female, but a ninja to boot. Anytime we introduced a new player to the game group there was the inevitable akwardness of "oh yeah, Nik's playing a chick so just keep that in mind."
I had one pick up SR game put together back when I first joined the boards that was meeting irl at a FLGS, the players and Gm were so wierded out by me playing a female character they basically said 'change it to a guy or you're not playing'.

I personally don't see cross-playing as any kind of deep seated trauma manifestation, but rather when I make a character I plan on playing for more than a throw away session I sit down and pick some aspect of my personality I want to explore and I use that as the seed for the personality of the character. I tend to use RP heavy campaigns as therapy. One of my favorite characters was in Mage: the Ascension, a bitter, sexually confused female Hollow One who hated vampires for playing mind games with the girl she was in love with, but herself forced to have feelings for a male vamp who had fed her blood to save her life (1 step towards blood bound). That was one of my favorite characters I've played to date.

I don't know if I would say I idolize women or myself want to be a woman, I happen to like the equipment I was born with, but I am in touch with my feminine side and used to RP my Hollow One on a mIRC chat room for White Wolf games, most folks thought I was a woman the Storyteller knew I wasn't but never gave it away. They found out quickly when they tried to pm me for cyber (what is it about the internet and spawning hng's?) that I was in fact a guy.

And on the subject of computer games and cross-tooning, I'm in the "stare at a female ass for hours" school of thought. My toons are always little hotties and if I have the bag space, they are naked as long as possible between fights. eh, c'est la vie

I'm a male, and I have always played a male. My next character should be a female just to break the chain...

but I dread the awkward flirtations between characters of different genders with players of the same....

I believe that the best way to deal with sexual harassment is to sexually harass the harassers back even worse. There is nothing quite so fun as having your female character go on a non-sequitur rant about the best way to prepare mountain oysters in response to an unwanted proposition, particularly if the harasser doesn't initially know what mountain oysters are but slowly comes to understand via the context of the rant.

As a player and a gm, I've played both genders (and multiple races) any number of times. I generally get an idea in my head of the type of character I want to play, and the gender of the character just kind of falls into place. But I've never really played an uber-hottie female. Too bad I don't play now, I've got an itch to try one.

Unless you count NWN 1, I play attractive women online in that game all the time. Like someone else said, I just like to look at the character walking around sometimes or the profile picture. Wow, I need a life, or a date.

I think a better, more funny question is... Anyone ever played a homosexual male? I mean, I've seen the female lesbian posts.
But if you're straight and want a really good roleplay, you could try to be gay. Hmm, interesting.

This post went off track SLIGHTLY... The question was, do you play the same sex that YOU are or the opposite? I didn't mention a damn thing about if your PC was lesbian or gay. I appologize to anyone who took offense to any of the comments. I was just wondering what the common denominator was of male/female PC vs players.

Good question. I've played a bisexual male and basically an androgynous female. Never did homosexual male. I think it's because I harbor some latent anger from when a pair of gay men ruined my D&D game.

Well, it's SR. Bisexuality is probably much more common than today... After all with the Matrix you can even have a homosexual relationship with someone from the opposite sex.

Am a girl. Play a girl.

Am a boy. Play a boy.

Am creeped out by boys who play girls.

For me, it varies.

I've played some female characters in paper games. Hell, I've even gotten complements from RL females on my female characters for portraying them realistically (I guess I'm in touch with my feminine side or something). That said, I mostly play males when I play paper games because its less effort to get into character.

In MMOs, I go for whatever gives be the best/most options to customize my avatar. City of Heroes/Villains is fantastic in this regard, especially for female costumes. So I made a larger than normal number of females in that game, probably about 2/3 of my character there were female.

I don't feel compelled to play the beautiful people, so I rarely make cheesecake/beefcake characters. I'd rather be the absurdly competent person that's saving everyone else's bacon.

-paws

nah, i ain't creeped out by my buddies playing girl-characters . . i generally make fun of them for it . . especially, if those girly have physical attributes close to maxed out, sometimes above, charisma of 1 or th lowest possible for their meta-race and are still portrayed as beautyfull and sexy beyond compare . .

Girls who play boys
Like they're boys who like girls
Who play boys like they're girls
Who play girls like they're boys
Always should be someone you really love roleplay

*knasser dances*

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lol Knasser