GeekFactor

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

@GeekFactor Mmmmm, Good post, but by your example you'd think three woman I've met IRL were men based on how they choose to play their characters. Though you've mentioned something that seems to be absent from most female characters I've seen.

On the topic of relationship crazy lesbians, I do find it both interesting and disturbing that I've come across so many non-hetrosexual characters in my time on RPG guild. I mean I would expect a magical girl roleplay to contain a lot of gay woman, but they seem to crop up almost everywhere. Their sexuality seems to get brought up or hinted at during their first few posts and then they're off to hook up. I wonder if this is wish fulfillment or something else.

@BrokenPromise

It was just one example, and I did preface it by saying it might not be the best to give. It was off the cuff of a very tired me, and there are so many aspects and angles and layers and variations of human behavior, it's impossible to say "all women are this" or "all men are that". These are merely my thoughts and experiences, and I'll be the first to say I don't always express what I'm thinking in the most coherent manner.

I very much agree with your second point.

Post a random fact about yourself.

<Snipped quote by GeekFactor>

But too much pain can cause lack of feeling. Something about having your heart grow double the size and then implode in on itself, resulting in a black hole from which no emotion could escape.

@Chasebloodcrest

To be honest, I was speaking of a recent physical ordeal I went through.

Though, I do not find this to be true on an emotional level. For myself, at least. I have dealt with "shutting down" my emotions to survive in the past, but you don't really become numb at all. You just exist in a continual state of denial.

Post a random fact about yourself.

I would much prefer to deal with pain than lack of feeling.

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

<Snipped quote by Kassarock>

Thanks for this post.

To the argument that playing a role you like is the chief joy of roleplaying, I'd counter that some people have the most fun not by tailoring that one aspect of the story (their own characters) endemically to their own tastes, but by contributing to immersion on the whole. Sometimes that means making a personal sacrifice for the greater good, in a sense, in the form of playing homelier characters, or ones who match a weird, alien beauty standard, or ones who tell different stories through their deformities, disfigurations, ugly personalities, mistakes, regrets ... (basically, who make the world feel more lived-in.)

<Snipped quote by GeekFactor>

Interesting insights all around; thanks for sharing. If you're willing to expound, what were the signs that tipped you off to male players playing female characters badly (and vice-versa)?

I don't play enough women to feel called out, but should that ever change in one of my many self-imposed writing challenges, your advice may prove indispensable.

@pugbutter

Some of the easiest and quickest to spot are the over-sexualized gals. Often lesbians, but not always. Often aggressively seeking to hook up with others. Many times these characters are young women, on the cusp of "sexual awakening". Or they're hookers/prostitutes/"bad girls with a heart of gold", etc. They're often used to blatantly fulfill personal fantasies of the male player. There's little subtlety to them, they're tough, they're aggressive, they're bold, they're basically men with breasts. There is a great complexity and tenuousness to a young woman discovering her womanhood and the brutish "bull in a china shop" demeanor doesn't really jive.

On a similar note is the tendency to overplay aggressiveness (sexuality aside) in general. I don't mean blatant, physical violence or anger. But women behave and communicate in an entirely different way than men do and it's very easy to project "what I think the other gender is like" rather than what the other gender actually *is* like. Again, some of these differences are so subtle, and I may not be able to explain them well, and if I fail there, forgive me. Men tend to be direct and forthcoming in their words; they say what they mean, they don't beat around the bush, they speak words to accomplish something or make something happen. Women are far more complex and indirect in their words sometimes. They speak to express thoughts, feelings, wishes, disappointments, and believe that doing so will then result in the actions. For instance, let's say we're roleplaying a farmer and his wife, and there's a hole in the roof that needs to be fixed. All the farmer's wife has to say is, "Tom, you need to fix that hole today, there's a storm coming in!" But in her mind, he can see the damn hole, he should be able to figure out that it needs to be fixed, so she says, "You know, I were real disappointed when our supper got ruined the last time it rained and all that water came in." Whereas Tom simply needs her to remind him that there's a hole in the roof that he's perfectly willing to repair, she'll express how his neglecting it made her feel, thinking "Well, if he cares about me and the kids, he'll perk up and get it done!"

That may be a clumsy example, but there you go. Men who RP women will almost always forego those subtleties and just plunge ahead with "speaking their mind" bluntly. They may even realize that this isn't an inherently feminine trait and skirt around it by claiming that their female character is "unusually blunt" (which goes right back to most of them being too bold/aggressive to be believable as women).

To be fair, it's somewhat easy to pick out the women trying to RP as men sometimes, so don't think that my reply is some kind of dig against male players, because it isn't! It's just that there are differences in the sexes that go far beyond the physical. And it's tricky to have the awareness of who one is, and who one *isn't*... to make it believable.

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

<Snipped quote by Andreyich>

Modern beauty standards being shoehorned into pseudo-historical settings is a whole other annoyance worth its own post, so thanks for bringing it up. Though @stone raises a good point in that not enough people are creating faceclaims worth using, and you often gotta scour, like, Ilya Repin paintings to find any portraits worth the while.

@pugbutter

Dude, you know all the women in the 12th century had fake lashes and bronzer, what's wrong with you? :P

If it's any consolation, I used this image for one of my characters: wikiart.org/en/daniel-ridgway-knight/…

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

I wonder - does anyone else have a character archetype (so, something that is somewhat defined and common in media) that they rarely see in RPs?

I feel like I almost never see "Big Burly Manly-man with Family they love to talk about" at all.

@stone

Fat people. Dear God, where are the fat people?

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

<Snipped quote by Raxacoricofallapatorius>

If you're beautiful irl though, it's all you know

@POOHEAD189

You would know ;) <3

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

"Diversity" in RP is a tricky thing, in my opinion. At the risk of infuriating someone, it's almost laughably easy to tell when a man is trying to roleplay a woman and vice versa. At least, that is my experience, but then I am someone who is highly observant and intuitive about behaviors and subtleties that many others miss. I have roleplayed male characters, and while I'd like to think I've done a decent job at it, I would never sit here and say that I can portray a man as well as an actual man could, because I am not, and never will be, a man. And no, I'm not interested in gender politics, I'm simply giving my own opinion here.

I think that people give their best RP performances *by far* when they stick to what they know. That doesn't mean you could never *convincingly* portray another race/gender/etc, but I don't want convincing quality RP, I want mind-blowing. Whenever possible, anyway. I don't think it's necessarily brave or edgy or courageous or what-have-you to leap far out of your comfort zone and believe that you can jump into the mind of a character whose shoes you've never even thought about, let alone walked in. That smacks of arrogance to me. I could give some examples, but I don't want to further risk ruffling feathers.

How do you feel about the level of character diversity you’ve experienced?

*blind reply to OP*

It's definitely a real phenomenon. There are common tropes that repeat in storytelling and have since mankind began telling stories. Our real lives tend to be bland and disappointing, and stories/fantasies/myths/epics explore all those unfulfilled longings that reside in the deepest and most base places of our humanity. People have always been, and will always be, people. Because of that, we have always and will always see the same character tropes repeated endlessly.

That being said, I am always insanely excited to run into characters who stray outside the more commonly rehashed molds, and I try to make my own characters interesting without falling into those old traps. It's a learning process, and I think most of us cringe if we look back at our old attempts at character building (I know I do). Also, there *are* people who grow up as abused, abandoned orphans, or ethereally beautiful narcissists. Almost every trope you can think of *does* match a real person, somewhere in the world. But when you're in an enclosed universe of roleplay, it's harder to find variety because the world is shrunk to the size of your fellow players.

So I try to measure my character creation based on the universe that I'm playing in, the characters already in play (I may adore the thought of playing a leather-clad female assassin, for example, but if there are already half a dozen of those, I won't make another), what interests me, what I know I'm good at portraying, and then try to think of something interesting to make them feel "real". I have no wish to play overpowered, physically perfect, flawless characters. Right now I have an uneducated cripple, a woman with violent schizophrenia, a libertine with no impulse control, and a few others.

Whenever I happen to find a character who is both well-written and *interesting*, that is like finding a treasure. Granted, everyone will define "interesting" in their own way, but I will take the complex, layered, background character over the powerful, brilliant, gorgeous, charming, spotlight-hound any day.

Evening everyone.

Well, hello there.