By Cirsova:
I know I may be double dipping here, but I’d like to hear some thoughts on the topic of character gender in game. Now, Dungeon Bastard once said something to the effect that in a game where you have people pretending to be elves and dwarves and halflings, what’s so different about someone playing a character of a different gender?
Now, I will totally cop to giving a fellow gamer shit for playing a little girl wizard in Exalted once, but that had more to do with my hatred of the wunderkind archetype and the fact that back then I’d have probably found any reason to give the guy shit, cuz I was a lot crappier dude back then. But nowadays, I’d be a lot more open minded about someone wanting to play a character of a different gender, so long as they weren’t going out of their way to be super creepy about it (“I take off all my clothes to maximize my dex bonus! Do the monsters think I’m hot?”)
But the thought I had a few days back at Cirsova had less to do with picking and playing a character of a different sex and more with dealing with the circumstances of a character having their sex/gender changed by unnatural means. It is typically included as a gag, a trick played on the player by the GM for laughs as part of a trap (such as the Tomb of Horror’s Arch of Reversal) or as part of a list of random bad effects from poisons or wild surges or such, with “target/caster changes gender” listed alongside effects such as “target/caster turns invisible”, “target/caster turns to stone”, “target/caster turns astral”, etc. But gender is not a binary status ailment; it’s a defining part of who we are and how we identify ourselves and relate to others.
If we go by conventions of classic comedy, there are four possible “good” outcomes (a 2×2 grid) for such a character that satisfy the requirements of a happy ending. The first variable would be the character’s gender by the end of the tale. The character would either come to accept their new gender and the way they now relate to the world, or the character would manage to reverse the switch to restore the original paradigm. The other variable, of course, would be the gender of the character’s romantic interest with whom he/she could end his/her tale. One possibility would be the opposite of character’s original gender (perhaps a relationship prior to the switch?). The other would be the opposite of the character’s current gender, a heterosexual relationship developed after the switch or homosocial romantic tension alleviated in the heteronormative society by the switch. Now, I’m assuming a fairly typical D&D type fantasy setting here, of course; all of this goes out the window in a setting such as in Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, where characters go around changing bodies and gender ever so often on a whim.
Has anyone had a character who had their gender switched involuntarily? How did you roleplay it? Did you play it straight or for laughs? Did your character find a way to lift the curse, were they forced to grudgingly live out their life as someone that they were not, or did they come to accept themself?
*:Area 14 B, Tomb of Horrors.
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