Crossplay

Referring to the player, else I'd have made reference to the stats of the PC itself.

I do believe you're being a tad reactionary. The entire reason why I was bringing up his chara's "femininity" and her in-game quote of "teehee" is that he seems to be carrying some conceptions of it that he either:

a. Cannot convincingly portray
b. Is too stereotypically feminine to the point where it becomes cringeworthy.

It's gotten to the point where he's essentially created a waifu for himself.

The biological differences between the sexes are well documented and can be recounted by others more qualified than I. Off the top of my head, women can perceive a greater range of colors (pehaps the byproduct of being primarily gatherers during the hunter-gatherer stage of human development), can tolerate heat better than most men, and their bodies, having built in life-support for infants, do not feel the taxing effects of aging quite as keenly as men do, which is why a significant portion of older populations tend to be women.

The differences I posit are more cultural than anything else. Spergs and SJWs are going to insist that playing a woman is intrinsically no different from playing a man, but there are nuances, both cultural and sociopolitical, which make a woman's experience of reality fundamentally different from a man's.

If you've ever played Warband, there ya go. Women can occupy the same positions as men within that medieval sim, but more often than not, they are subjected to doubts and patronization far more frequently.

>Or is it universally a shit decision?
There's no universal truths, and a good enough roleplayer can probably pull off anything... but generally speaking, this goes nowhere good. At best, it ends up just being a constant distraction.

>are nuances, both cultural and sociopolitical, which make a black's experience of reality fundamentally different from a white's.

I realize you're trying to be ironic but that is also true

I had a player make a blind female seer/scholar once in a GURPS game. He played her realistically, like a well rounded character. There was no bikini armor or seducing every guy. Once in a while she'd try to use her charms, but as she wasn't a super attractive girl to start, and a nervous bookworm, we all at the table figured it made sense both in and out of character why the attempts to seduce/persuade were a bit hamfisted. She, and th eplayer, ended up being some of my favorite character/player interactions ever.

SO, universally a bad idea? no. Just like every other character type, it comes down to player and DM. Odds are if a person can't play a decently designed and rounded out female, they cant play anything half decently.

Did you have a point, or are you just hoping to create some lame /pol/ drama on Veeky Forums?

The implication that sex is an arbitrary choice in character creation is kinda something I wish wasn't the case.

It's going to influence how the character interacts with the world and how they are perceived, and I do think that if you're going to play a female PC you really ought to put some thought into it.

Prevents the whole waifu-ization process from even being a thing.

>SO, universally a bad idea? no. Just like every other character type, it comes down to player and DM. Odds are if a person can't play a decently designed and rounded out female, they cant play anything half decently.

A helpful point of comparison. Thanks for this, user.

>play male character kind of sassy and bitchy
>has a low life expectancy due to low HP and constant joking about how my character is going to die next might actually convince the DM to kill him off
>players keep trying to coerce me into playing a female character next

>one of the PCs decides to roll up a dwarven character
>has no honor and cant even sell a passing illusion of clan loyalty
>race of character has next to no impact on how they perceive the world
>"beer and whores"

I suspect you're a faggot who cannot handle people in a role playing game trying to play a role in a game.

Why would you even play a Dwarf if you're not going to make an attempt to ground the character's ethos as a reaction/adherence/rejection of his cultural norms?

People aren't blank slates user, and no character traits come from nothing.

You could say the same thing about any number of variables related to a person's development. This isn't to say you shouldn't focus on the impact of your character's sex on who they are if you want, but it is in no way more required than any other number of variables. Food and air quality can (and usually) have a far greater impact on a person than what sex they were born with, but I've never seen anyone mention that at the table. As always, it depends on the game and the kind of character you want to make. Sometimes a guy with a sword is just a guy with a sword. Replace guy with girl and nothing has to change.

>make your typical manlyman fighter guy
>gee I'll make it a woman this time!
>acts and plays just the same

This. It's honestly the worst when people put no effort into it.

Elves just being humans with pointy ears is terrible.

3 of my players are playing as chicks, but they make no attempt to change their characters at all to the point that they're all conveniently lesbians. The one girl at the table is playing a dwarf though and she at least tries to be gruff, so that's kinda nice.

women also have a higher pain tolerance and are more flexible. There's also some documentation of slower reflexes and poorer special coordination on average.

>both cultural and sociopolitical
It boggles my mind that NO ONE will ever believe this. The normies at work. The losers who hate women. The SJWs who don't understand biology. Even some of the intelligent people I talk to.

Your DM is a bit creepy, but not intolerably so as long as that shit stays in game.

RIGHT?! Bring up the notion that men and women possess different biological strengths then you're called a bigot or a variant of misogynist/misandrist.

If your choice of sex/race adds nothing to the depth of your chara then you're really better off, on average, playing to your strengths and having another point of similarity between you and your PC.

I have never had a good experience with players creating characters, so no.

It is a failure of society that we don't teach basic tenants of biology and psychology, or, you know, that your personal experience doesn't equate to universal truth.

Okay, done venting.

I'm so sorry. My limited experience has resulted in mostly what you'd expect. One guy made a tiefling girl that was... basically him. No weird fetish stuff, but gender doesn't matter. He also made a one-armed character once and was a good sport about the penalties I put on him for certain checks.

Another dude who tended to play women was decent at it. A practical noble one game, a down on their luck business owner in another.

Most my other players (with the exception of a guy who RP'd a mute really well) were on the spectrum of decent to Murder Hobo.

Have you ever imagined that the PLAYER gets something out of it?
This OP reeks of "UGH BUT HE IS NOT ROLEPLAYING PROPERLY"

I am a male and I play female more often than not. Not only none of the 3 groups I play have a problem with it, but often I am praised in making my characters feel 'real' by the other players. A couple times I heard that my girls are more interesting and compelling characters than my guys. 2 of this groups are online and 1 is live. In the live group we have 2 irl girls and they don't seem to mind any more than the man.

I also DM every once in a while and play NPCs of both genders, sometimes for extended periods as the party hires a guide or has a escort mission. I never heard any complaints or saw anyone cringe.

But I have seem guys playing "teehee" style females or playing a girl just to go on a lesbian sex rampage, or worse, asking me if they can play a futa.

My point being. Not, it's not a universally shit decision, there are people who are good at it and people who are bad at it. Like drawing, writing, cooking and acting, etc., some people are good at doing some of them, some are great, and some suck serious ass.

Roleplaying is not isent from the same rules that govern other abilties people have in life. So if you have people how are able to write well and some who aren't, the same apply to 'crossplay', which is a cringy attempt at creating a word for a thing that shouldn't be a thing.

I'm glad there's some likelihood that it can be done well. I'm 6 sessions in with the dude and for every cool RP moment he's got hours worth of either pointless waifu philandering or "quirky" mannerisms. I think I just needed to vent.

Also regarding the use of the term crossplay- I'm actually surprised the sentiment in this thread seems to insinuate that it's a "new" word. I've seen it used in MMO parlance and lingo for a while now- is there a workable alternative for it? I'm really only using the term for convenience's sake.

It's not part of Veeky Forums's vocabulary and the topic has been debated to exhaustion here, so the introduction of the new word feels new and foreign. It's like going to a medical convention and saying mipples when you mean male nipples and find that the doctors there reject it, even though it was common in your medical community for ages.

Stories where everything goes fine are not good Veeky Forums storytime material.

I've played with and DM'd for crossplayers numerous times and it's never been an issue.

I know a guy who only allows women to crossplay because he thinks crossplaying men alwas secretly masturbate to their characters.

>He doesn't know women also secretly masturbate to their male characters
Women are worse than men sometimes

>people actually asked to play futas
>instead of just doing it and not telling anyone

That's some autism

Don't speak for Veeky Forums , we know all kinds of words even if you don't.

>female player rolls female character
>character isn't feminine at all

How do I tell her to act more girly? If this continues on, I might have to throw her out for roleplaying a character wrong. I already threw out a guy who rolled a dude with 7 strength for not being manly enough, I don't want it to repeat.

>Be me, dude user
>Play a female character in D&D user game
>She's totally focused on her goals and preventing the rest of the group from being absolute destructive shitlords
>Use motherly rather than sexual female tropes, when appropriate
>Become defacto leader of the group, trying to instill some in-character morality into these idiots
>Not a single creepy thing wrt my character happens over the span of the campaign, which lasted about a year
>Still sad to this day that it ended

>I'm DMing
>That Guy plays a female harpy
>Ok
>That Guy tries to sleep with every woman in the fucking campaign to have hot lesbian sex, focusing more on that than the campaign itself
>I guess that's OK
>I make one of the NPCs androgynous and only reveal it to be a dude after That Guy tried to seduce, but he's fine with this
>Uhhh
>TFW I later realize that he's a /d/egenerate and is totally into traps

Don't let furfags play monstergirls.

Good player and good DM detected.

Silly DMs. If I'm not masturbating to how cool my character is, I'm masturbating to how well I'm pulling off the character (male or female). I wear baggy pants for a reason.

Show them how it's done user. I'm sure you can pull up some YouTube clip of a Bratz or MLP or Barbie show for the girl. Give her instructions and one warning, clearly explaining what you expect from your game.

And the guy, just dump penalty after penalty on him until he just gets his character killed off and rerolls with a minimum 11 in strength, even as a caster.

It's almost as if the gender of a character doesn't fucking matter who cares.

who hurt you

i did!

I'm writing this just in the hope that it maybe makes you understand the other side a bit more, even if you still disagree / there are still idiots that scream out 'misogyny' at the first hint of differentiation.

The difficulty is largely not about actual biological differences like pain tolerance but has more to do with the history of justifying the mistreatment / subjugation of women in cultural and socialpolitical structures by using arguments based on 'scientific, empirical fact' that was largely conjured up for the purpose of justifying that subjugation.

Has the pendulum swung to far? Sure, for now, it's often the case that what we can document and justify about differences can be a trigger for those strongly committed to the ideas that everyone is exactly equal in this regard. But hopefully you can at least be sympathetic to the idea that we are still springing back in some sense from what was a malformed, abused use of knowledge to oppress.

Again, not saying everyone's the same or that people that get triggered are right, just that understanding the history of how knowledge was abused shapes the future we're in today.

What are you on about? The only time Sex needs to come into play is when a female PC needs to seduce a male NPC.

>I guess that's OK
There's your problem, right there.

But the gender of the character can matter depending on the game, it can influence certain interaction. Mechanically though I think it's better to keep it fair and square and not give malus/bonus depending on the gender

While I agree, I kind of want to see a system that did this with some races. Imagine an insect-like race that had higher strength for females, or a cat-like race that gave hunting and tracing bonuses to females (different bonuses to males). We already assume things like dwarves being good at fighting orcs or carving into stone, or elves not needing sleep. Would sexual dimorphism across biological or societal structures in a nonhuman race be a big deal?

My god, an actual, level-headed discussion of gender issues on Veeky Forums that goes even an inch deeper than "muh Tumblr".

Hats off to you, user.

I've seen better gender discourse here on Veeky Forums than I've ever seen on Tumblr.

Of course, I've seen far *far* worse too... and more often. But still.

One of the guys I play with has made a good amount of female characters. Hasn't really caused any decrease in game quality.

Says you. I'm ready to get comfy.

>play female dwarf
>everybody forgets she's a female
>3 levels later
>playing a male dwarf

Don't play the female dwarf for them
Play it for yourself

Really, both sites at their worst tend towards an atmosphere of and echo chambers for resentment and bigotry. The main difference is in flavour.

The way i see it, typically adventurers are given a bit of an exception to gender norms. Mostly because they tend to be 1) Very powerful individuals, 2) have a bunch of stuff they can use to be even more powerful, and 3) surround themselves with powerful friends. You can typically tell who the adventurers are (hint, it's the group of 3-6 people of a variety of races who never take off their armor, even at the tavern), so it's not hard to excuse them out of fear more than anything.

My favorite character (one of our groups' faves as well) was a male sorcerer turned female through abduction and subsequent extra-planar experimentation.

The character was always trying to appear male despite the reality of his/her situation. Only time I RP'd femininity was if we thought seduction was the best course of action.

It might just be because i'm shit at roleplaying, but i'll play a female character and then not do a whole lot with it. I dunno i probably just need more experience roleplaying.

>tenants
It is a failure of society that we no longer teach the difference between the word "tenant" and the word "tenet".

uhh this probably sounded more clever in your head.

I mean probably. I was always more focused on travel than spelling. Good catch.

>>has no charisma and cant even sell a passing illusion of femininity
Implying females must be feminine
>>sex of character has next to no impact on how they perceive the world
Then why do you care?
>>"teehee"

I would MUCH rather a character ignore their sex than make it their defining characteristic.

1. Its much easier to crossplay online, in text format, then IRL.

2. I have literally never had a problem with a crossplaying character in an IRL game. If someone can convincingly pretend to be a century old elf, a battle-hardened veteran, or a transdimensional AI in a Silver Age Capeshift setting whose defining characteristic is an inability to comprehend human culture and a love of cheesefries [not eating them mind you, cheesefry LORE and MINUTAE] why the fuck can't they roleplay a vagina?

because your number 2 is as rare as finding a successful socialist country

>If someone can convincingly pretend to be a century old elf, a battle-hardened veteran, or a transdimensional AI
well I suppose as soon as I meet a single roleplayer I trust to actually convincingly pretend to be any of these things I'll start to consider good crossplaying a possibility too

Granted, most players don't want to play as fatty-food themed AIs. A man can dream though.

Vagina-RP is MUCH more common though.

>Implying females must be feminine
That insinuation was never present. When I refer to "femininity" I mean it as the collective body of cultural nuances and mannerisms that further cement gender dimorphic societal roles.

The way a woman acts is ALWAYS one of three responses to said roles: a) blind adherence, b) rejection, c) reformation and internalization.

Choice of the PC's sex has no MECHANICAL impact on most games, but for narrative/rp reasons, players should take the sociocultural paradigms into account when designing a female character. For example, the classic "Pious Knight" character carries with it an extremely different set of implications if the figure beneath the greathelm turns out to be a woman. I imagine good crossplayers evaluate the given sex of their character and envision traits and mannerisms that stem forth as a result of their uniquely different experience of reality.

>Then why do you care?
For the same reason I care when one of the PCs decides to play an Elf or Half Dragon or Tiefling EXACTLY as they would a normal human. If your chara concept does not factor in the idiosyncracies of race/sex into the PC's consciousness, ideals, and responses to society, then you were better off just grabbing a pregen or making a generic NPC, or even better yet, NOT crossplaying at all.

You sound rediculous and you couldn't have a more wrong idea of what people enjoy about RPGS

Even more absurd would be the notion that there is any one reason or objective that draws people into RPGs. The politically savvy value complex social institutions and courtly intrigue in their games, for example. Others seek Horror in various shades (ranging from Lovecraftian to campy B-horror), and others still, quite paradoxically, enjoy playing in Modern/Hypermodern settings that bear a great deal of similitude to our world.

The only universal appeal of an RPG is the opportunity to play a role. The types and nuances of said roles are dependent, of course, on the system, the setting, the table composition, and the DM proper.

>Higher pain tolerance
Er, if I recall correctly, they have a higher amount of nerve endings on their skin, so you could say it is more sensitive.
I hear the childbirth argument a lot though, but do you know why they fill them with something called an epi anesthetic nowadays?
Because they feel a lot of pain. And I don't know if there is evidence saying men couldn't also take -that specific type of pain-, because, well, men don't give birth.

We're kinda gimped from the beginning since pain is an intrinsically subjective experience. From what studies I can recall reading, Men have a higher pain threshold (which means the force of a stimuli until it affects them is much higher), whereas Women have a higher pain tolerance- which is to say, they can endure pain for a substantial amount of time before collapsing in agony.

Of course, there's the issue that the Men during the tests are merely WILLING themselves to ignore the pain (to appear macho, consciously or subconsciously), which kinda fucks with even the pretense of objectivity during empirical evaluations of the data.

>has no charisma and cant even sell a passing illusion of femininit

These types of women also exist; user.

>sex of character has next to no impact on how they perceive the world

Real question, how often does this ever come up for male characters?

So
Men: +2 str +2int
Women: +2 dex +2 con

Sounds good

Read the goddamn thread user. You're not the first to raise the "OH BUT SOME WOMEN" argument.

>Real question, how often does this ever come up for male characters?
It's rarely ever addressed to the same degree as it is with Female PCs, but implicitly, the choice of a Male PC carries with it just as much cultural baggage. "The woman is subject to man on account of the weakness of her nature" as St. Augustine wrote- this leaves men, more often than not, in positions of authority as they were saddled with the responsibilities of providing final say in pretty much every domestic matter.

Another implicit aspect that the Male Sex imposes upon PCs would be gender expectations- specifically, demonstrations of martial prowess and physical might. A man such as King Alfred of Wessex, who prized theological study and academic achievement over skilled swordplay, for example, would be looked down upon by his peers simply by virtue of the fact that he deviates from this "standard" image of masculinity.

Consider also how most fielded armies tend to be comprised of men. Men are implicitly expected to fight and die for the sake of their societies, and such a mindset could definitely inform the ethos of, say, a Fighter or a Barbarian, hell, even a Paladin.

People are the byproducts of genetics, individual choice, and culture. No exceptions, regardless of sex.

>higher pain tolerance
My sister is the most paper thin skinned baby back bitch I've ever known.
That is just propaganda spread to empower women and make them feel better for having to squeezs babies out of their vaginas.

>"muh sister"

Anecdotes aren't evidence.

And nearly every "scientific study" on the subject of gender pain tolerance has too many variables to yield valid data. It's just not quantifiable.

Hence the mention of pain as subjective experience. Still, a chart relaying a range of subjective experiences recorded on paper is far more credible a source than any one anecdote.

A collection of data put together by special interest groups to exhibit the desired lobbied result should not be held over ones personal experience.

Personal experience is worthless as scientific evidence if the results are isolated and non-replicable.

People still care about this?
It's 2017 society thinks your weird for not having a fursona never mind this shit.

If the choice of gender is moot then how can it be a problem.