Cross-dressing

This week’s RPG WISH:

What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?

UPDATE: Doyce, not surprisingly, does a great job looking at different styles of doing this, including Yours Truly and Wife. Everything else he says about folks there is true.

I’ve never had a problem with this. While it’s occasionally difficult in getting your pronouns mixed up (little name cards with the character’s picture are useful here), I find that men and women both bring a lot of interesting observations to their RPG portrayal of folks of the opposite sex — or of other races, professions, alignments, heritage, orientation, or whatever.

Are there aspects to being female that I, as a male, cannot accurately peg, either as a player or as a GM running an NPC? Maybe. Though I suspect that there are (a) a lot more fundamental human similarities than gender differences between men and women, and (b) a lot more personal differences between individuals than gender differences.

Of course, there’s always the sex and romance question — role-playing someone not of your gender (or orientation or aesthetic) in a sexual situation can be a challenge. Not that it’s come up that often in the game I’ve played, mind you. But I found that it actually made me really think hard about how the character would really react, and why. That is, if you will, part of what makes role-playing so intersting.

As a player, I’ve played a number of female characters — Morrigan, Aladris, Shishiko, Selene, Della, probably others I’m spacing on. I don’t think that I played them as “men in drag,” but the fact that they were women was not always the most important fact about the character (any more than the fact that Grinthorn or Graeme or Dag have male genitalia is the most important thing to know about them). The female characters, with the exception of Della, were not terribly “girly,” but I’ve GMed a number of female NPCs who were — and, again, my male characters tend not to be muscle-bulging he-men, either.

If a human can play an elf, I’m not sure why a man cannot run a woman, or a woman a man.