[generic] I'm AFK for a few days and you have an inclusivity thread without me

[Stronty Girl]

Now I feel terribly excluded!

I'm female. In Real Life I am not and have never been a girly girl. Despite the best efforts of my parents and various other relatives of their generation, I have zero interest in dresses, shoes, handbags, make-up, babies, slushy love stories or things coloured pink. So I don't want to roleplay some girly girl stereotype: I've been fighting tooth and nail to avoid conforming to that all my life. Why the hell would I want to do it in my hobby time?

At con games I'm uninterested in 'token' female characters. A mate of mine made my blood boil because the only female characters in his pulp game were the cliches of the Plucky Girl Reporter and the Escaped Concubine (translation: ex sex slave) and he kept saying "oh but it is appropriate for the genre". Yeah because in a game with Martians, ghosts and triffids, you couldn't possibly make the imaginative leap to make the Big Game Hunter or the Retired Airship Pilot a woman.

Mostly I play male characters. Playing a manly man stereotype is interesting, because no-one IRL has ever tried to force me to be a manly man. (I also play non manly men).

For con games I try to do double-sided character sheets. Both sides are identical, apart from the picture: guy on one side, gal on the other. I use photos of actors, not necessarily for a game about that TV series (e.g. I use Bluestone 42, Our Girl, The Unit and various movies for my military science fiction games) . Pick the side of the character sheet you want, assign them the gender and sexuality you want.

 

[Dr.Dichotomy]

This is brilliant! I'd totally put a female big game hunter in a game. I'll try working something similar into mine for Furnace. OK, no big game in 1980s Stretford, but I will think on this.

And Hi Dr Bob I met you once a couple years ago at a Garrison Con and hope to run into you again one day.

Andrew

 

[Guvnor]

Thanks @Stronty Girl. Would it be appropriate for me to say you struck me as a womanly woman in the empowered feminist sense?

As in... Why are we talking about girly girls and manly men?

Women are not girls, men are not boys.

Let's at least allow people adult hood. When people refer to women as girls at my table or at work I always correct them, in my opinion it's just rude.

I also think that seeing parenting as non manly or girly is quite inappropriate, it's a core human role that requires and demands dedication and duty just as much receives the reward of love.

 

[Dr.Dichotomy]

I think if we gathered up all the character sheets after a con and really tried to classify each character according to some parameters, male/ female, weak/strong in a fight, brains/no brains etc (@Stronty Girl please help me here!) then we’d end up with some kind of graphical representation of the ability and personality spread assigned across either gender that might be either revealing or a “no shit Sherlock” (depending on how one views any scientific result). I lean to the latter and would take a guess that the curve for results for women would be a Gaussian distribution with Stronty Girl’s plucky reporter type at its peak.

“Plucky reporter: The camera is your weapon, range zero.”

 

[Stronty Girl]

@Guvnor - it's probably a generation thing. Me and my mates use "tomboy" and "girly girl" to indicate the two ends of the woman spectrum. But we're old and crotchety. "Manly man" on the other hand, we most often use when we are slightly taking the piss of Hollywood macho men stereotypes. The most brilliantly funny, mickey take of that stereotype I've ever read is here: https://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/my-script-for-the-next-big-aaa-blockbuster/

@DrDichotomy - I suspect your survey would show 'job' stereotypes (police officer or knight = man; nurse or fashion model = woman) rather than divide along brains/no brains. It's the unconscious bias thing in action. Time pressed GM needs to produce half a dozen character sheets in a hurry, and their brain takes the shortcut to the stereotype.

I once played in a Delta Green game where the character sheet just had a surname, and you had boxes to tick for gender: choice of male, female or other.

 

[Darran]

As a practical bit of advice for any pre-gen character sheets is to allow for additional customisation by the players.
Whether that is adding additional weapons, items, skills, discriptors, name, gender, etc at the table during play.