Fantasy setting i'm DMing has traditional gender roles

Isn't Soldier a pretty generic term?

If you go for more specifics, wouldn't it be easier to accept?

>Archer
As long as you can aim in the general direction of the enemy, isn't that pretty good? When you add in Crossbows, doesn't that make it even easier?

>Nurse/Medic
You need someone to fix up your inevitable wounded, just make it so the people in charge tend to put her closer to the action with a sword at the ready.

Your using a steppe nomad. Ironically she'd be fine in that environment.

>Archer

It takes a decent amount of upper body strength to properly draw a longbow. More than most women have.

Operating word is "most".
Player characters rarely if ever represent the norm of their society.

Serious question, what's the point in having traditional gender roles in a fantasy setting? Not even all places on earth had gender roles as you understand them.

>Woman can't do archery.
You just say these things because you can't get a date, right?

Fine, then say he has to play a female bodybuilder or nothing.

It's not about your world or story, bruh. It's about the players having fun with what they want to do.

Make it clear that it's not an easy life because of the gender rolls but if he really wants to do it let him.

Mulan it up.

Essentially this. Make people doubt his character's capabilities, make them less likely to listen to their opinion, have women pity his character while also talking down to her at the same time.

You know what, we didn't ask OP about the setting.

I can see a 40K parody setting where a Lord sends in women soldiers to pad out his numbers. The punishment for not sending out X amount of soldiers is worse than the ridicule of sending women.

Lord of the Rings had a good one, where if your back is against the wall, anyone capabling of stabbing is promoted to soldier.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wartime_cross-dressers

It's always hilarious seeing someone post something that isn't controversial on any board but Veeky Forums then suddenly the tumblrites come out the woodworks when it's posted on Veeky Forums.

>Come to the board that argues about minutiae ALL THE TIME
>Surprised people argue
Hello /pol/

Also
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_in_medieval_warfare

It's dickheads like this that shouldn't ever run a game. If you want to be an inflexible jerk off right a book.

Praytell point me out to a "tumblrite" in this thread

Send a big pack of orcs to rape him.

What the fuck are you even talking about?

Let me guess when you say "on any board" you mean /pol/, /v/ and maybe /tv/ right?

>Ctrl+F
>/pol/
>3 results

... One of those is the post you just made. Also, if you read the other 2, it's literally 1 dumb person who brought it up.

Veeky Forums is having a bad effect on you. Get off until you can learn to be an individual.

Adventurers are always the outliers, and that discrepancy makes things interesting.

Make them have to be sweet polly oliver over it like Mulan. Them being female is a secret.

1. Why would you have "traditional gender roles" in a fantasy setting?
2. There were women in warfare, user...

I mean, how traditional? Is it illegal or impossible to have a female soldier, or is it just rare? Either way it sounds like the player wants to force the issue and is seeking out narrative friction concerning this break in gender roles. If you don't feel like having to constantly RP a gender role differential then explain that.

Because Conan and Beowulf and Odysseus did it and it didn't adversly effect the setting(s)? For Conan especially, having gender roles didn't even mean females were less capable, just that they weren't expected to do all the things that men did which made characters like Red Sonja all the more remarkable.

We also don't know if the guy is referring explicitly to a ranking, professional soldier. Obviously it's extremely unlikely (though not impossible) for a woman to become some kind of recognized officer or (wo)Man-At-Arms. But it's absolutely not unfeasible for her to just be some peasant chick who scrounged together some second-rate chainmail and a sword and fell in with a marching army.

Recognizing and playing with sexual discrimination is totally appropriate. But people who get legitimately flustered about a female adventurer having a martial background are a special kind of autistic.

Seconding this. Personally I tend to prefer relative gender parity in my settings, but if you're gonna stick with hardline patriarchal gender roles, at least do something interesting with it.

If he's a good roleplayer then it'll improve the game because it'll give him friction against which to work. If he's a tool who's just trying to be contrary, it'll frustrate him into giving up and just playing an easy character.

Dear diary.
Today, as usual, OP was an unimaginative faggot

Have him Mulan it obviously.

Basically he is going to have to suffer a lot of social interaction penalties and it will be hard for his solider to be taken seriously unless he has her actively hide she is a woman. It can create some fun RP situations and even allows for a dramatic revel when the time comes. But if he is going to play warrior woman and not hide her gender, shes going to get ignored and harassed.

Even Joan of Arc would find women serving under her and tell them to fuck off.

The female knight in GoT gets harassed and isn't taken serious and constantly has to prove herself and even then most people still mock her.

Sure. I mean the whole "she proves herself to be so awesomely amazing in combat that they just HAVE to recruit her and still probably winds up getting captured and needing the male protagonist to rescue her, or else just winds up fighting the evil token girl" is dumb overdone and self-defeating, even without the spoilered bit, but it's not outlandish to have something more grounded, like "It's unusual but she seems decent enough and we're crazy shorthanded."

The best/most likely scenario would be that the captain/whatever is just too shorthanded to turn away a woman who can fight as well or, considering D&D levels, better than the average man. Then she just sticks around.

Conan had men and women breaking stereotypes all the time, like you said with Red Sonja. Beowulf was an on Anglo-Norse tale with the very beginning overtures towards Christianity that touch on sin and the inherant turns towards sin men (even heroes) make.

Odysseus (I assume you mean the Illiad and Odyssey) was an even older Greek epic that had gods and goddesses, witches, drugs, monsters and more. Exactly what "traditional gender roles" are you on about?

Some young scrub punking everyone else because of "natural talent" is annoying regardless of gender.

Gotta earn those victories, y'know?

Sport bows are not the same as warbows. For one, bows meant for sport are not made to pierce armor.

Are you saying that women in peak physical strength cannot not properly use a warbow?

And more than most men have. A draw weight of 400-490 Newtons is difficult, but still well within the bounds of what real-world women are capable of doing. It'd take way more practice and working out than the average man, but it's no more impossible than, say, Ranger training.

And before you say it, most of the women who failed Ranger training didn't fail on the physical challenges. They failed on the parts of testing that relied on front-line infantry training, since they never got it. Look it up.

Ever played Mount & Blade? I like how they do it.

Sure you can be a female soldier/lord but don't expect for people to respect you, give you jobs or reward you for anything.

Exactly. It's just like someone running into a game as a heroic orc. Everyone will question them, nobody will trust them, and they just have to prove themselves even more.

Player characters intrinsically represent the unusual, the exception.

>you need to be a bodybuilder to be a performance athlete
>bodybuilders and performance athletes are even remotely comparable

t. fatty

A competent woman is slightly more plausible than dragons existing, so I'd allow it.

AHEM

We prefer to be called "powerlifters" user

Where can I buy your comedy album? Or do you have a proper hour-long special yet?

...

audible kek

>t. Jason Genova

>1. Why would you have "traditional gender roles" in a fantasy setting?

Because it's a fantasy setting and it can have anything due to being fantasy.
If op wants "traditional gender roles" he can have "traditional gender roles".
He could even have "extreme gender roles" if he wanted; it's fantasy.

>2. There were women in warfare, user...
You're purposefully missing the point and not contributing anything.
I mean, I'm not either by calling out your bait, but whaaaaeeeaaatever.

Well OP was basically looking for ways to get around the fact that in traditional gender roles, women don't fight.

That commenter merely pointed out that though gender roles are normative, they're just that: exceptions do exist. Saying that "no, in my setting there aren't exceptions" is kind of the height of that guy-ery.

"Because nothing is utterly stopping me from doing it" isn't actually a reason for doing something. You get that, right?

>Why did you try to ride a barrel down a steep hill, from the outside, without at least putting on a helmet?
>It's a barrel. I can do what I want with it.

PCs are, inherently, exceptional people with exceptional circumstances. Instead of whining about how it doesn't fit, make it fit. Make the adversities the woman faces part of the character development and overarcing story threads.

How is this even a fucking question?

He's asking what to do in this scenario making it a question.

>"Because nothing is utterly stopping me from doing it" isn't actually a reason for doing something. You get that, right?

Dungeons and Dragons isn't real, user.

>Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the retort "Because it's there", which has been called "the most famous three words in mountaineering".

It's like you don't even want to go adventuring

Are there mechanical differences between men and women? If not, then you're not really enforcing your theme very much.

Tell him no or give him 8 strength.

If you told him why you want him to be male and he still keeps insisting on being female he's trying to join the wrong game. Alternatively you can ask him why he wants to be female, and then decide if it's a good reason or not.

...

Assuming you're not a humongous faggot GM, you simply let him play the kind of exceptional woman who could be a female soldier. A fluke.

Doing so doesn't change anything about your setting; his character would be an extraordinary and rare exception to the rule, and would constantly have to prove her clearly strange and unusual ability to others.
If anything, it underpins and emphasizes the existence of traditional gender roles in your setting via contrast, yet still allows him to play the character he wanted.

Gender roles existing doesn't mean that everyone universally adheres to them. A female soldier would be a rare oddity, but they could exist.

Women in peak physical condition can barely pass the army's minimim physical requirements for men.

So very likely the answer is no

Don't. It's your game. Tell him "No female soldiers, man. It just wouldn't work with the rest of your party. If not, hey, there's always the highway..."

> Serious question, what's the point in having traditional gender roles in a fantasy setting? Not even all places on earth had gender roles as you understand them.

What's the point of having dragons, orcs or magic in a fantasy setting?

Not that guy, but I don't allow cross-playing or extremely weird characters, for a simple reason. Players, in the heat of the moment, tend to play themselves. Most players I've met can't really 'hold their role' when they're excited. At the same time, you have to consider situations like this:

> "I head off to gather information."
> "People back away, give you the evil eye, or otherwise make gestures of warding."
> "What? Why the f-"
> "You're an eight-foot-tall half-demon with horns and glowing red eyes. These people think you're the Devil."
> "Ohhhhh, right..."

Or it could be something like:

> "Wow, the princess is really hot. I flirt with her."
> "You're playing a woman, and she's only interested in men."
> "Damn, I forgot."

>What's the point of having dragons, orcs or magic in a fantasy setting?
What's the point of restricting female soldiers in a fantasy setting?

Learn to collaborate.

>players don't hold to their roles in tense moments

This can lead to interesting developments though. For example with the eight foot tall half demon, it could be a big thing where they keep trying to interact normally, but are warded off. But after enough work, the town may warm up to them, allowing him to act more regularly.

Could be interesting if the DM handles it right.

Do no. 1, OP

Honestly I can see #5 being a great motive for a BBEG or something. A female warlord razing the four corners of the Earth for a belt of reverse gender, because for all her shame at being born a woman, she is undoubtedly the strongest and fiercest woman on the planet, and once she becomes a man she will be truly unstoppable.

The DM can't handle it right, only the player can. Which I think was largely anons point.

It is much for this reason that I tend to not allow the cross thing as well.

The player forgets, the other players forget, and it has to be specifically addressed for it to be remembered. For whatever strange reason 'dwarf' or 'elf' don't end up that way. But the cross sex thing tends to.

>guy insists on playing as a female
I smell a magical realm a brewing.

That's exactly what you're asking for if you make a setting that explicitly has traditional gender roles. How is him playing a female soldier not the best possible outcome of your decision? That's a character with a built-in conflict.

Any roleplaying game is about the PCs. Don't cockblock them. His story is about how his character interacts with your world. Make that interesting and fun.

This is also why you need to establish the players as a coherent group. Really weird classes or alignment are just not going to fit in.

Like, if you went "All right, all of you are the chosen Champions of Good." Then one player, whom everyone has forgotten, goes "Actually, I'm Evil. Remember?" and spoils the moment.

It's always that one guy who wants to be out of the ordinary who tends to disrupt things. Like "You're all wizards, so you levitate down the mountain."

"Wait, I'm not a wizard! I've only been pretending to be one via sleight-of-hand and trickery, remember?"

So now what? Do you, the DM, take a time-consuming detour to accomodate one guy, or you do just go "Fuck it" and say "Okay, I guess you plummet to your death"?

You give the fake wizard his moment of having to reveal his true nature to the party. That's one of the scenes his character was made for, and the first one you should be chomping at the bit to play out.

I would be wary of any guy who insists on playing a girl.

At any rate all you need to do is stick to how your setting would treat the character. If he bitches about it then oh well, he's the one who insisted on playing a girl in a setting with traditional gender roles.

lol or he could just bind up his bosom like in quite a few fairy tales I enjoyed as a little girl

>but this guy doesn't sound like actually interesting person
glad you're cautious about passing judgement due to lack of complete information, user.

>lame tropes: the post

lol they're fun stories

lol it all depends on execution

How hard do you think it is for an average woman to pretend to be a man in a fantasy setting?

There's no government ID. At best, there's a note of your birth at local church. If you're not from around here, nobody knows who or what you are.

Most armies at the time would likely have 13-16 year old recruits so lack of facial hair or lanky builds wouldn't be out of place.

An average soldier isn't going to be in peak physical shape in a medieval society, and a pre-modern army sure as hell wouldn't have standardized fitness tests.

You sound like a SJW in First Year Gender Studies

It probably wouldn't be easy for extended periods, especially if you're trying to blend into a predominantly male environment like an army.

No, but much like fictional stories RPGs tend to set aside a lot of dull minutiae that could cause daily complications, especially when it comes to backgrounds.

If you're doing a super gritty realistic survival game, maybe such things should be a concern. For the vast majority of games though I don't see why it would be too much of an issue.

I don't recall any of my PC's every watching each other pee or bathe.

If the hidden girl keeps talking about wanting to bathe and then balks when they find the inn has two baths in one room and no screen... well, that is drama for the story, which I think is why most of us are here.

Just cap their strength by 4

realize that there's nothing traditional about murderhobos and carry on.

>What's the point of having dragons, orcs or magic in a fantasy setting?

Unimaginative niggers ripping off Tolkien, mostly.

...

Allow him, but if it's something odd make it look like something odd, make him face rejection, maybe his goal can be that people accept him/her.

I do this, then tell them how to build a brutal Dex character and still kickass like Stronk McBeefy