[quote=@Dagger]
Spin off question (I'll update the original post too): What are obstacles you have to writing characters who are a different gender/race/sexuality/any other quality as yourself?

I notice a lot of people in the 1x1 section seem to stick to writing as their own gender and want to open this thread up further for discussion and advice for anyone who might want to branch out from their niche, whatever that may be.
[/quote]

I find the biggest obstacle, to me, is actually differing areas of expertise. My characters often know things that I don't, and not everything can be easily Googled; one might, for example, give their character high mental attributes and a knowledge specialty in law on their sheet, but the idea of what it actually looks like to have a career in estate law is kinda tricky to get one's head around, but necessary even if only for the purposes of set dressing - what the character's workplace looks like, how they dress for it, the kind of work schedule they have to plan their RPG shenanigans around, the sort of detail that can be ultimately unimportant but which flesh out your character as their own distinct [i]character[/i] and not action hero John Doe #930714.

Heck, even in a more typical fantasy setting, once one exhausts the limited vocabulary of "I slashed at the enemy with my sword" learned from watching movies, one realises that one doesn't know much about sword maintenance or horseback riding, y'know? 

But what with LARPers and people reconstructing medieval swordsmanship and equestrianism being alive and well, some of those are easy enough to get an idea of; you could even just go rewatch LotR and think about how you'd use words to describe the things they have and do on the screen, you don't actually need to know how it works from a technical standpoint, just what it would LOOK like XD. And I suppose in that vein I should just go watch more of those law dramas or something XDXD.

I haven't dipped my toes into the 1x1 section in ages, but I personally usually write male characters even though I'm female LOL. One major aspect of the appeal of RPing to me is the opportunities to explore things I'm not, so cue the self-indulgent dude-in-a-leather-longcoat kind of character LMAO XD, but also, honestly, why not?