This week’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die
What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?
I don’t think I do female characters very well. I try to avoid the obvious cliches, and end up playing characters that are effectively blokes in drag. As a player I prefer to play male characters, as a GM my female NPCs (at the moment in my PBeMs and PBMBs I seem to be playing as many female NPCs as male) tend to be a bit two-dimensional. You’ll have to ask my players how well they come over.
I have one or two memorable experiences of playing female PCs. There was the case in an on-line Call of Cthulhu game where I was led to believe that Karl Tolhurst (him again) had been magically sex-changed, and I started posting as ‘Karla’. Turned out that it was an experimental memory transfer gone wrong, and I was one one the GM’s NPCs who believed she was Karl, having access to his memories. I also played a female computer geek with no social skills in a convention game run by the same GM.
