Topic: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

Feel free to discuss the topic here.

Link to the article:  http://dev.seedthecommunity.org/index.p … p;Itemid=1

The article's intro:

Female characters are often portrayed badly in roleplaying. I’m going to give a short explanation of some of the most common things that go wrong, and also give a few tips to those people who want to portray as realistic a female character as they can.

Last edited by Norah (2007-07-26 18:21:29)

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

hey cool! the first article in our community! great work!

The nature of the article does mean that a lot of this will be your opinion on the subject, but that doesnt really matter as you do have the right to state many of these things as facts (considering your gender at all wink )

I would have liked to have read some more in-depth tips on how to actually make a beliveable female char... I know I would be aweful at rp'ing a female character so if you got some more tips it would be great!

Again, great work and good to see you taking the initative to create the first (of hopefully!) many articles big_smile

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

Oluf wrote:

hey cool! the first article in our community! great work!

The nature of the article does mean that a lot of this will be your opinion on the subject, but that doesnt really matter as you do have the right to state many of these things as facts (considering your gender at all wink )

I would have liked to have read some more in-depth tips on how to actually make a beliveable female char... I know I would be aweful at rp'ing a female character so if you got some more tips it would be great!

Again, great work and good to see you taking the initative to create the first (of hopefully!) many articles big_smile

A lot of it is my opinion, but I didn't just make it all up. There are a million articles about this subject already, so I didn't really do anything ground-breaking (:P), but I did verify what I wrote apart from the stuff that is just highly dependent on someone's opinions.

And then of course there is all the stuff I can take straight from personal experience, also on the mistaken side tongue. I'm not guilt-free when it comes to RPing something at least close to a stereotype big_smile.

Last edited by Norah (2007-07-26 18:20:30)

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

As I mentioned before, you're probably dead-on with this. I've not seen so much of this kind of thing myself, probably because I've roleplayed mostly with you people in MMOs. Anyways, a well-written an thorough first article.

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

I've seen way too much of it in WoW -_-

But you got it in Seed as well. You really find it everywhere, usually even the really heavy stereotypes. Well, ok, you don't find the naked-dancing cybersex chars everywhere... but certainly in WoW.

And I'm actually still prone to slip up with regards to cliche/melodrama and a bit of stereotyping, so I watch it carefully. But generally I don't really care if people (and me) slip up now and then, as long as they're not one of those walking stereotypes tongue.

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

It's not a question of 'slipping'.. Being like that can be both realistic and fun in smaller doses, and very fitting. It's only when it becomes cliché or stereotyped, constant behaviour for the benefit of that behaviour it's wrong. I.e. the constant dramaqueen.. Hey, is the dramaqueen perhaps another stereotype, or is she too heavily intertwined with the victim?

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

I wouldn't count a dramaqueen as a stereotype of a female character, because it can be for either sex, and it is more like a problem with a certain player. No matter what char they play (can be a realistic char mostly too), they will seek attention, will always need more heroic deeds, more tragic tragedies, the worstest butcherings in their past, etc, than anyone around them.
I count it as something that falls under more of a player-thing, like those players that insist on telling their char's whole life story when they first meet you, or the ones talking in Ye Olde English, because they think that is what RP is.

I knew probably the worst The Victim stereotype I have ever seen, anywhere, when I was playing WoW, but she was not a drama-seeker at all (He I mean, really, because guess what? Male player tongue).
And I also knew a terrible dramaqueen in WoW who played a very non-stereotypical character.

And it doesn't have to be intertwined with the victim, but perhaps the people who are dramaqueens often end up stereotyping their female chars that way?

And I do count it as slipping up for me, because it happens when I don't want it to, and I feel unsatisfied about it afterwards.

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

A good article, though I'm actually having trouble fitting it in with personal experience... Most of the female chars I interact with in City of Heroes/Villains are pretty well played. Several of them could be fitted into the stereotypes mentioned, but even they tend to be three-dimensional. I suspect this is because there seems to be a higher proportion of the female characters being played by actual females in the circle of RPers I've ended up in.

Plus, if you're taking examples from WoW, well, what do you expect? wink

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

Stereotypal characters don't need to be flat - they can be just as deep and three-dimensional as anyone and still be stereotypical. After all, real people can be stereotypical. There probably are real-life women (and men too, sure) that fall under Norah's categories. The point is that they're not actually real female traits, and thus you should not take them as such as you roleplay a female.

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

And add to that, that they may actually fit very well into a comicbook setting big_smile. Finally a place where you would actually expect to find them?  tongue

But yes, the point was that a lot of people playing the stereotypes, often don't realise just that (not to mention a lot of people around them). You could be doing it on purpose of course, but I think a lot of people playing obvious stereotypes are trying to play / thinking they are playing, realistic, well rounded personalities. Even if they're not flat chars, that doesn't make them anymore realistic personalities. Of course, if they keep developing as characters during the time the player plays them, they may end up a lot more non-stereotypical than they begun.
Some people do act that way IRL, but those are usually people you look at and wonder wth they are doing, or you feel like they are taking life as a soap series.

And I took examples from Seed just as much as WoW tongue.

There actually were a lot of good RPers in WoW (and I still count my Victim friend as a good RPer despite the horrible character he portrayed there, seriously, she made me ill, you just wanted to slap her around and yell at her to grow a spine), but the sheer number of people meant that there was a high number of all the bad stuff too. It was certainly a bigger pool to take experiences from than Seed, but that you could find blatant stereotyping even in Seed is kinda telling.

The female chars played by real women have so far more often been realistic than the female chars played by men (and that's not to say that all the female chars I know to have been played by men have been unrealistic), but they still tend to be so ingrained with certain notions from RL, that they fail to take that out of their RP in the gameworld which is often very different from RL, plus, no one is immune to the vanity. So far I have played, in all the online games I have played so far, with only a handful of female chars that did not look 'stunningly beautiful' (or other such descriptions). I'm still glad that in Seed there wasn't a FlagRSP kind of thing, or built-in char descriptions for the chars that you could choose to look at, or a forum or database where most people enthusiastically entered their char descriptions, or I'm sure the same trend would have shown up there.

Of course, that worked as a sort of mirror. You start to notice the trend, and note how it's actually kind of tiring, and then you remember that you tend to do this yourself just as well. And you can then adapt and stop doing that.

Last edited by Norah (2007-07-29 23:16:12)

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

Equality
On a NWN server I used to play there was discussions about the woman's role in the fictive medieval'ish gameworld. Would an unmarried woman competing with the male adventurers appear as something strange? Would they need protection against the male population?
The discussion ended, I think, with a ban against certain types of sexual roleplay (thank goodness), and that, in the eyes of the typical commoner - all adventurers was strange.

Fantasy
In WoW there was a lot of female/female marriages, but I never saw any male/male wedding - even the female/male ones were unusual then. So there was obviously young guys living out their fantasies in the fantasy world, rather than trying to portray a realistic character.

I used to play a female character in WoW, never really gave the gender much thought, but when one of my in-game friends tried to seduce my character I really felt uneasy. We had until then played a fairytale type of love relationship, but when cybering came into the picture - all roleplay went out the window.

About the strikingly beautiful female characters, aren't they as common as the over-dramatic backgrounds? You want your character to be interesting in itself, even before you enter the world. I think it's a phase everyone goes through.

Do you even think about gender when you roleplay a male character, or is it just personality in that case? If so do we need to consider gender when roleplaying a female?

http://www.elfonlyinn.net/d/20040726.html

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

There may be a lot of "Stunningly Beautiful" women out there, but I see a lot of the guys aren't exactly homely. The only ones who aren't incredibly good looking are mutated/scarred/somehow hideous- one extreme or the other. RPing is a form of wish-fulfilment, and how many people, deep down inside, want to be "Average"?

Likewise, I think the "Slut" stereotype comes from the same place. Men playing a Slut are acting the way they wish real women would act, Women are acting the way they would never dream of acting in RL but still fantasise about anyway.

As for gender- I've never played a Female character either in an MMOG or tabletop RP. I need to identify with the characters I play on some level, and I just can't seem to manage that with female PCs. It probably doesn't help that there are a couple of RL friends who play female characters very badly in Tabletop RP, which probably put me off even trying it myself.

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

Tantavalist wrote:

There may be a lot of "Stunningly Beautiful" women out there, but I see a lot of the guys aren't exactly homely. The only ones who aren't incredibly good looking are mutated/scarred/somehow hideous- one extreme or the other. RPing is a form of wish-fulfilment, and how many people, deep down inside, want to be "Average"?

Likewise, I think the "Slut" stereotype comes from the same place. Men playing a Slut are acting the way they wish real women would act, Women are acting the way they would never dream of acting in RL but still fantasise about anyway.

As for gender- I've never played a Female character either in an MMOG or tabletop RP. I need to identify with the characters I play on some level, and I just can't seem to manage that with female PCs. It probably doesn't help that there are a couple of RL friends who play female characters very badly in Tabletop RP, which probably put me off even trying it myself.

I just don't know why people think they need to look beautiful to have a non-average char. By the whole nature of what you're doing you know you're char isn't going to end up average anyways, even if they are average in all ways that they can be (looks, skills, personality, etc). They are going to be in a non-average situation and lots of non-average stuff will be happening to them.  And in most of those games they are outright super-powerful to begin with (everyone's a hero in most MMOs).
And besides, when all the chars are either stunningly beautiful or hideously ugly, your gorgeous or ugly char will hardly stand out of the crowd anymore! There were so many of the beuatiful chars in WoW that I got really bored with it, and my own regular-looking char actually drew more attention. By that time I had stopped making gorgeous chars for a while already though, so it wasn't even sought-after attention. It did result in many people asking me for RP tips for some reason.

And the looking beautiful and the overly dramatic stuff happening to their char fails to make their chars more interesting, it's usually just annoying.

I think people do need to forget about / stop thinking constantly about having to portray a different gender, when they want to play a char of the other gender.
I think the identification problems also stem from that in part: people think too much about now being a different gender. I see a lot of people having "Oh my god I need to portray someone of a different genderthan me, gotta act girly, gotta act GIRLY!" type reactions. Not to mention that their idea of what acting girly/being a woman means is usually the kind of stuff that makes you wince when you have to watch it (stereotyping etc). (same goes for women playing men, only that happens a lot less often).
I don't usually play a male char, but when I do, I just play a personality, I would do very little, possibly nothing, different than when I play a female char (possibly apart from the sexual orientation of the char, I would probably make a male char attracted to female chars, not other male chars. Or maybe not, but with so many RPers still shying away from (male)  gay relationships in RP, even though they should be able to separate RP frpom RL better than that (:P), my char would likely be destned to a lonely life, and I would feel so sad for it).

I also think a lot of those lesbian relationships come from those male players assuming that the other female char is RL female, no matter that their own char isn't either, and that it's much more likely that the other female char is RL male too. Not (just) that they want to live out some fantasy. You see it so often, them finding out after a while that the other player was also male, and the relationship getting quickly broken off. And also in female/male RP relationships, the RL male player asking you for your gender, because they don't want to RP a relationship with a char if the player behind it is male.

And to the seducing of a female char by a friend, are you sure it was cybering he was after?
I would make a distinction between people after cybersex, and an IC relationship progressing from fairytale-romance-no-sex-involved to one where sex is a part of it. Not everyone does RP sex, but then you can just talk to the player of the char that your char is involved with and get both your standpoints clear on it. If one of the two doesn't do RP sex, you can always just imply that the chars are having sex without playing it out.

-Norah/Liath-
"Do not follow! The milk is not ready, and you are not ready for the milk!"
-Psychonauts: Milkman Conspiracy area

Re: Roleplaying a Female Character – More Difficult than It Looks

I remember reading that Amanda Tappings, who plays Samantha Carter in Stargate SG-1, agrees with you, Norah. At the beginning of the show, she sometimes got these "female" stories, like getting all motherly at a child etc. At some point she told the writers to stop writing her character as a female and just write her as if writing a man. To date, she's one of the best female characters on TV.

As for myself, I admit to the vanity thing occasionally (Faeron, for instance), but I've also done the regular guy thing. And you're right, my plump mercenary-wannabe was probably one of the most special characters in Narfell (a NWN PW).

I think one of the things why people tend to make comely characters is that they're the main characters of the stories they play. And everyone is used to TV shows and movies having very good-looking protagonists. Being regular-looking would make them like one of the extras.