When is it acceptable for a male player to play as a female character?

>When is it acceptable for a male player to play as a female character?
Never.
>Vice Versa, is it just as bad usually when a female player rolls up a dude?
When she isn't transsexual.

I've seen it happen all the time, and its usually always these big beefy "otterbod" fuckbois that have the personalities of a boyband performer persona, even the ones with dumpstatted charisma

>Never
Why?
>When she isn't transsexual.
What do ya mean by that?

I've never known an actual RPG group where males playing females, or vice versa, has been an issue. At this point I think it's just a meme repeated by idiots on Veeky Forums who don't actually play RPGs.

I've seen both happen. More with guys playing girls, but then again most of the people I've played with has been guys so that's to be expected.

Did you see this getting discussed in the 5e thread or something? Or are you the same user who decided to just make a thread about it to try and stir more shit? Making a character who is the opposite gender is only weird if you make it weird. Your entire group makes it weird. Please die.

It's calmed down in recent years, but I think it had something to with WoW in like 2007 after an expansion boosted their player count massively, over the idea of G.I.R.L. or dudes larping as female avatars took off.
Burning Crusade I beleive? Blood Elves and Draenei players WERE the biggest purpertrators

In my group there's a guy that if he plays a female character they're often one dimensional and we have to watch him for stupid shenanigans.

>be ThatGuy playing female bard. Decides that earning money playing music is dumb and prostitution is the way to go. Takes money, does the deed, and calls the guard on the guy for rape(CG character mind you) Campaign ends right there and ThatGuy is banned from playing female characters ever since.

Good player outside of that one moment though.

In text games.

I don't play 5e, or browse generals, sorry.
What about it makes it weird though. Why is it that weird shit gets a pass because she's a girl?

Female here.

Every time I roleplay (either in tabletop or text), I find it easier to divorce myself from my character if I play as male. (Maybe because I'm new or something, it's harder to think "My Character Would Do [X]" when I'm playing a chick rather than "I Would Do [X]".)

I did get a lot of good-natured ribbing from the table because me an another female player (playing a female character) ended up in a super awkward UST situation (her character used Charm Person on mine to get my ass moving early in the campaign, mine misunderstood the resulting sentiment as "Welp, since I didn't back sass the hot chick when she told me to do stuff, that must mean I like her or something"). I found the comments annoying but in hindsight, it was pretty funny that I ended up shipping my character with hers.

If the player is functional enough to stay at my table, then the player is functional enough to play cross-gender.

>Why is it that weird shit gets a pass because she's a girl?
Because your group is a bunch of mouthbreathers that don't find it a little bit objectionable that someone is describing their character's feet with "deliciously hairy." Someone might have said something if it was one of the fellow masses of male fat.

Interesting. I hadn't really thought of it like that before, but I can understand the logic, playing a character of the other gender making it easier to grasp the IC/OOC divide while you're still getting used to it. That actually makes a lot of sense.

Crossplay is only acceptable in text.
If we're doing voice, stick to the gender you have.

Why yes, that does mean my NPCs are all the same gender. Why do you ask?

That sounds really fucking boring

>Is there not-awkward ERP?
Only when it's mutually wanted. ERP is awkward when it's clear one person is really into it and the rest aren't, sorta like when a group has just one drunk guy in it. Sexuality, like drunkenness, is something that everyone involved should have the same level of interest in, regardless of what that level is.

A bunch of manchild? Is that when too many neckbeards sit too close to each other, causing a miniature black hole between them, that forces their bodies into one solid mass?

You know, you don't have to actually try the voice.

Unless you're either naturally talented at voices or playing a really lighthearted game, it's usually not worth bothering.

Always?

I mean, I don't do the whole 'I am my character' thing. It's more like watching a movie or reading a book, I guess. I know it's meta, but the end result for the others looks the same, and I get what I want.

So if I go by the logic of 'never cross', I'd also have to abstain from reading books with female PoVs etc.

It also kinda depends on the player. If it's some massive autist trying to fulfill his fetishes, then no. Not even because it's bad conceptually, just the front-end of it is gonna be too cringy. On the other hand I filter out autists from my games.

I always flip a coin to see if my character is male or female before I start rolling up the character.

Why the hell would it be a problem? I've played for ages, a lot of that in mixed groups, and I've never had problems with guys playing female characters or gals playing males.

Over at /v/ it's a classic troll thread to provoke the argument of whether it's better to play as female PCs or male PCs in third-person games. The two arguments in it generally boil down to
>It's harder for me to project myself into a woman
vs
>If I'm gonna stare at a third-person ass all day it might as well be a woman
and this argument never gets resolved because at the end of the day it comes down to instinctive cognitive style. Some people project, others observe. By which I mean that most or all people do both, but they do one more than the other.

People who project themselves into a character might have a harder time doing so with characters who are radically unlike them, and this also explains the classic but misguided rejoinder about pretending to be an elf/dwarf/dragon/alien/whatever but finding pretending to be a girl hard. It's misguided because of course it's easier to go along with something that has no real world context for comparison.

>it comes down to instinctive cognitive style. Some people project, others observe. By which I mean that most or all people do both, but they do one more than the other.
Well that's legitmately incredibly insightful
So It's like an INTP vs. INTJ kinda ordeal or...?

>the /v/ argument
Oh yeah, the classic. But here, how the fuck I'm supposed to project myself into a fucking videogame character?

I have hard time doing immersion in tRPGs (although I enjoy them a lot, and no I'm not a gamist; I don't even play DnD). It's outright impossible in videogames: they're just too restrictive/scripted.

When I played MMOs I would always make a barbie doll female character, and treat them as such (builds and raiding minmaxer autism aside), so I'm firmly in the 'I don't wanna look at a CG guy's ass for days on end' camp.

But that's me. It's not like I'm gonna shove my opinion dick into someone's throat and force them to play the opposite gender if they don't want it.

>no real world context for comparison
True, that. An elf might be basically anything you want it to be so far as you stay within some lousy set of tropes.

On the contrary, people spend literal hours every day with the opposite gender. It's so much exposure that no matter how bad your understanding of them is, you are pretty fucking sensitive to any major deviations. Even at the worst case scenario, you're gonna judge someone's acting against your own mum.

As someone who almost exclusively plays female characters (for some reason I find the concepts for male characters I can make boring and not worth committing into), it's actually pretty hard to pull off well. The thing is, you always have this risk of ending up being a man-child in a female skin, rather than a verisimilar female.

And I'd dare say your being an antisocial retard or a Chad drowning in pussy doesn't really matter because communicating with females from a position of a male and as a male is about the same kind of useless as having no experience at all. What you do need though, is stuff like female friends, girls you've never seen as a potential love interest but who nevertheless are very close to you etc.

>so far as
*as far as

>So It's like an INTP vs. INTJ kinda ordeal or...?
Noone knows. It's just one of those things. I bet if you did some academic study with a few thousand gamers you'd probably notice correlations between personality types and projection style, but I don't think it's ever actually been studied in this context, maybe some psychfag can correct me on that.

It sounds weird, but when I play a female, my character is more kind and caring to others. My male characters are either mean, dickish, or overly distant.

You want to sleep with your female characters (who you base on your mother) and you want to aggressively compete with your male characters (who represent your father's penis). This is why your female characters have classically nurturing traits. Your male characters, on the other hand, are subject to subconscious undermining, always carefully giving them something negative in order to justify masculine competition with them. Ja?

It might be that you subconsciously bring your female characters to the ideal of a caring mother, an archetype so deeply imprinted it's basically impossible to remove it.

On the other hand, your male characters might essentially be a super version of yourself, unconstrained by societal norms and other real life limitations that are or may be a source of suppressed frustration.
Your character is mean and dickish the same way as you're more likely to be mean/more straightforward on the net than in real life. Aggression and negativity are much more easily expressed when there's some distance between personas.

>Some people project, others observe. By which I mean that most or all people do both, but they do one more than the other.
It sucks when you are in both camps.

If playing female character I arrive at point when game wants me to "immerse" myself with character, I face cognitive dissonance and reload male save.
Then when playing as a male character I find cool armor and can't help but to wonder what is it's female model, so another reload.

Well there are only few character concepts that needs specific gender and that few are probably magical realm borderline so caution is needed when /tg level of autism is involved.
That is to say that /tg created social stigma stopped me from using a few character concepts from fear of being accused of magical realm.

>for some reason I find the concepts for male characters I can make boring and not worth committing into
and what are interesting concepts for female characters that can't be done with male ones?

that's the right way to handle that situation. sounds like the dude in question spends too much time reading horror stories about girls on the internet.

Huh. That's informative.

the freudposter may have a point there, yo.

Shouldn't you be off praying the gay away?

>implying I haven't already prayed the gay away

Concepts that are interesting to me personally, mind you. It's also about aesthetics reasons grounded my personal stereotypes about genders, I guess.

For example, I want to play a female character that is an amateur singer. She would be very kind and caring and open to the world, having less of a certain taint of banality than it is possible realistically. Then, the centrepiece would be the fact that she is mortally ill, some kind of uncurable disease that is diagnosed early, doesn't hinder life that much, until the time comes and it's all over very quickly.
She would be aware of her condition, and it would invite existential questions inside her head. She would ask herself, what was the merit of her having been born, having lived her life? What is the print that she would leave behind herself?
Ultimately, it would be a tale of search and choices and resolution and trial and error and a sense of accomplishment in the end, but with a twist: while the character would die peacefully with on her soul weighing her down, I, the player, would know it was all futile.
It's about trying to contrast my own, already ingrained cynical worldview to that of admirable naivete. I expect to undergo a temporary, but deep period of genuine depression after the concept is played out. I just need to do it correctly.

Now, I can't even begin to imagine a male character with the same premise having the same kind of desired effect.

Basically boils down to whether they're just using it for fetish shit or they have a character concept that happens to be of the opposite gender from the player.

I'm not sure how to feel about being Freud'd.

>a girl starts describing her Halfling dude's "treasure trail" and "deliciously" hairy feet
No one does that. No one. Your fake story is bad and you should feel bad you fucking weeb

Her "Career" is making furry porn if that helps it make any sense.

Well only problem with that concept is how to bring singer into game where 50% of content is indiscriminate murderhoboing and not make him/her a dead weight.

Other than that I fail to see how it can't be done with character of either gender, so probably personal opinion.

>is it just as bad usually when a female player rolls up a dude?

Its usually worse actually, women have no stigma against them using male characters so they dont restrain themselves

my old players would get pissy if I didn't voice everyone because "IT DISCOURAGES PROPER ROLE-PLAY!"

Your old players sound like cunts.

I think the problem is that when men play girls, the girls are always really badass and probably make real girls look/feel bad. Then girls have no idea how to play male characters because females can't understand the concepts of honor and duty.

Tldr men are better at being girls than girls, girls still suck major ass at being men

gr8 b8 m8, i r8 8/8

The problem is that, in the minds of most players, the default option is male. Thus, there is no reaosn to play a female character not intrinsically related to them being female, which dooms any decent, dramatic character concept from the start.

Morally, I have no issue with it, and with those few groups and individuals who understand that women, by any large, don’t act much differently from men, it can be thematically useful. But I don’t trust 9/10 of my players enough.

LOL

>When is it acceptable for a male player to play as a female character?
Why would it ever be unacceptable?

>I don’t trust 9/10 of my players enough.
This is the problem I see.
Trust seems to underrated by people.

I used to think it was totally lame, but that was back when graphics sucked. Now that graphics in games are almost as awesome as in real life... all my characters are females. For me personally, I would rather be looking at a hot girl with a big rack and curvaceous ass than a big buff dude.

Gone are the days where I need to feel like I'm injecting myself into the game.

Okay, but what does graphics have to do with Tabletop?

Im guessing this is why this shit always gets hypersexual with them?
The only thing I hear about post game is them deciding if they should be gay or not. Trying to decide if they shouldnt deprive girl NPCs of what they see as "Gods gift to women" or make them gay because no other reason than "*squee*"

is it just me or are yaoi fangirls not subtle, like, at all?

What do you mean? Are you trying to say that I should trust my players more? Or that people don’t understand how important trust is in making a decent campaign?

If there's a player with long hair, timid, skinny, always shaven and wears baggy clothes you should probably let them play as female characters without questioning them.

Subtlety is not in the Fujoshi's dictionary.
I've seen a few cut off their character's current standing relationships that had actual depth of character development and plot behind it on a whim, because they suddenly wanted them to be gay now. Like some fucking switch went off in their head and they can't stand the sight of a heterosexual relationship.
Like as in trying the fuck the estranged bastard brother of the countess sorcerer all of the sudden, because they were the nearest dude around when the countess stopped being bland enough to serve as an insert a-la Bella Swan.

Both.
Like in pfg thread, people are screetching about the DM giving the creatures abilities that can render certain pc abilities moot, and I don't get why.
I trust my GM to make a good campaign that is challenging to the players, and sometimes that means doing things outside the rules.
As for you, I exhort you to put trust in your players unless they have shown that trust is misplaced, and if it is misplaced, why are they at your table at all?

I don't get it, what's the joke?

Man I wish the erp threads were still around.

There is no joke I'm giving advice so you don't hurt their feelings or make them too anxious to play with you all as they want to play.

I don't know whether you're talking about repressed trans peeps or Norwegians

>When is it acceptable

Never. Unless you can actually make your voice sound like it belongs to the opposite sex.

>Norwegians
AHAHAHA
Nice one.

I can't tell if it's disingenuous shitposting or if people actually can't fathom playing a character whose sex is completely accidental to their personality.

Women do act differently than men tho, and that's why it's potentially interesting to explore the ramifications of that IC.

Put simply, picture the difference in attitude and outlook between a male and female Knight in a generally patriarchal society. The latter may have become bitter over a career of being turned away from quests because lol girls can't into honor or whatever.

It's going to be different for every setting but things like gender and sexuality have big impacts on who a person is, if you're dedicated and clever enough to write to those impacts.

If I know the guy and know he won't a.) use the character as his own magical realm, and b.) is a good roleplayer then I'll give the go okay on a guy playing a female character. Without those 2 conditions, 99 time out of a hundred, it turns into magical realm time, or a shitty stereotype.

Your example isn't about the differences between men and women, but how society approaches them, which is primarily why I play female pcs.
How the world reacts to you is the what I look for.

I don't care about a characters gender unless they try to rub in everyones face for whatever reason. Unless your character is acting sexual with npcs most people wont even remember its gender.

i think they actually can't fathom it. most of them get hung up on one side or the other of the gender distribution. for people like this, your sex is the core of what defines you.

Only bad of they later turn out to be a transtrender fag that was letting their medical condition get the best of them. Playing a cute grill character is fun and sexy though. Probably shouldn't do it if any actual women are in attendance though, as then you can't do any remotely-weird stuff. And even at a bro-down the weird/awkward stuff needs to be used at a bare minimum.

That's a semantic distinction at best. We're shaped by our experiences and in most settings gender has an impact on that.

(Armchair) psychfag here, you fell at the first hurdle when you used that bullshit four letters personality typing. Humans are complex and that test will yield different results if you take it at a different time of day or in a different mood, it's like trying to put a character into an alignment chart, people aren't consistent.

Adding to this, I recently played a priestess who I based on Naga the Serpent (because the DM was a big Slayers fan and I figured he'd get a hoot from it), replete with terrifying laugh and improbable clothing choices. That, along with her duty as an assassin for her temple, led to many interesting situations I'd be hard pressed to replicate with a male pc, even if they were similar.
And I've seen it go poorly. I had a player who tended to have muscular women as pcs, and when IO called him out on it (Stop magical realming my game), he dropped from the group, rather than make a different pc type.
I'd argue that you are the one splitting hairs, user. You can only control your pc. The world, and it's reaction to you, is what makes a pc viable, especially as in most games, a player character is not a typical example of their group.

Well fuck my life
Out of curiosity, How do you go about learning how to do that?
I think my DM is warming up to the idea if I can pull it off. As long as I don't talk like a gay guy or do that really bad "obviously male but higher pitch" thing.

>When is it acceptable for a male player to play as a female character?
When there are no women or soyboys in the group.

>Vice Versa, is it just as bad usually when a female
No
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Women_are_wonderful"_effect

...

A girl in my campaign is constantly playing dudes.
She won't stop trying to fuck literally everything that moves. its fucking annoying.

On your third character if you've been good up to that point

Pitch isn't as important as softness. And I don't mean volume, but texture. Don't be quieter, don't be higher pitched, be gentler. You'll need to practice quite a lot, because you also need to be able to be firm and confident in appropriate situations without losing the texture. It's not about being weak or retreating, but about being feminine.

>that really bad "obviously male but higher pitch" thing
The term is falsetto.

Actual psychfag here.
>Humans are complex and that test will yield different results if you take it at a different time of day or in a different mood
This should be enough to earn you a degree to be honest famalam. Personality tests are bullshit invented for recruitment specialists so they can use an """"objective"""" argument to tell their bosses to not hire that weird fuck that just came in.

>I see quite often that nobody at a table is weirded out when a girl starts describing her Halfling dude's "treasure trail" and "deliciously" hairy feet,
>quite often

I think this is more about who you are playing with and how you meet them. In any of my groups this sort of thing has never been an issue. I saw one GM try to arrange a potential sex scenario in one session based on a male playing a female character, but the player just shut it down with a "not interested RPing something like this" and everybody just moved on.

No fucking way I'm bringing that to a standard dnd game with standard lfg people.

>being this insecure about your manhood that you can't play as the prettiest girl of the whole damn kingdom
The issue with guys playing as girls is that they fear of being seen as gay. But fellas, thats the entire fucking point: if you are gonna play as a girl, then you better be queer as shit.
I have played as female characters and NPCs and I have openly expressed how thirsty my female elf librarian is for some DWARVEN DICK. I have stared at various man ASSES and I have speculated on DICK SIZES. If you are gonna play as a character that wears pink, then GET GAY.
Otherwise, you might as well play as a futa or a tomboy lesbian.
But why going through all this trouble? Personally, I see it as a challenge. My first gal was ridiculously hard to play becouse I described her as girly, yet as a female player noticed, my character sounded like a guy and did guy things.
TL;DR: If you play as a girl, be a massive faggot.

I don’t disagree with that. Indeed, as I said, if the player understands that women aren’t alien creatures, then it can be useful or even impactful to have female PCs. But very few people (in my experience) have the maturity, awareness, and creativity to play a female character any deeper than a stereotype

kek

Yes. Anyone who says no crossplay is retarded, we take turns GMing and if you aren't willing to be a lady, your worlds are going to be FUCKING WEIRD.

You are an adult playing make-believe with a bunch of other adults play whatever the fuck you want, you sperg.

I fucking hate these threads more than a million and a half bikinimail threads.

dunno play female as lesbian is not weird at all.

sorry dude but traps ARE gay