dnd

© 2012 Grace D. PalmerIn my last post, Exploring Women's Power, I gave a list of common restrictions on women during the medieval European time period and ended with the following:

So, that's the power structure you find yourself in if you are born a woman. While some women, particularly those of noble birth, can break those rules, for the vast majority of women, that wasn't really an option. And remember, you're still a person with basic needs and desires, such as food, water, shelter, sex, etc.

So, if you were a woman with those restrictions, how would you navigate society, providing for your own future and, perhaps if you have them, for your children?

The framing of the question is my first suggestion for how to deal with sex and gender in a more inclusive way in gaming books. I realize that D&D traces its roots to war gaming and in those games, it's common to provide modifiers to an entire class of people, such as all Greeks or all musketeers, based on commonalities within that group. This is common in other games as well, such as the Civilization franchise. For instance, in Civ, I often played the English because the benefits that country received fit well with my game play style and what I wanted out of the game.

But the thing with those games is that we are rarely playing an individual and are instead acting in a removed role, often from an almost god-like vantage point. These sorts of decisions make much more sense when we're dealing with a 10,000 foot viewpoint because fine details and differences are meant to be excluded because they are unimportant for the simulation we are doing.

However, when we move to a level of the individual, as we often do in games like D&D, this perspective can become stifling. We are often the protagonists of our stories, and those sorts of characters are usually most interesting because they struggle against or break away from the norms of their society. Bilbo and Frodo both go on adventures, something that is fairly scandalous for a hobbit to do. Part of what sets Drizzt apart is that he is male and that he was not sacrificed as a child, although tradition dictated he should have been.

In fact, we often strive to ignore these dictates, often through providing additional rules, classes, races, etc. Additionally, usually male norms of behavior for the time period are completely left off the table. Getting married and raising children was often considered a duty for both men and women. Likewise, I hope you don't start your adventuring campaign during harvest as every hand was needed to stave off starvation. In our works, somehow farm hands not only get swords but magically have the training to wield them.

With all that in mind, here's what I would suggest as a starting point.

Separate sex from gender

While some consider this a relatively modern thought, throughout history, there have been examples of societies offering the ability for people born of one sex to take on the trappings traditional for someone born of another. Shield maidens are a common fantasy example of this, women who act like men often at the cost of never having sex or experiencing motherhood and sworn virgins are a real world example. We can also find examples of this in How We Came to Live Here.

As studies of sex and gender have started to examine trends across cultures, we've found that many things people in the US or maybe even Europe thought were tied to one sex or gender doesn't universally apply across the globe. It appears that culture has a strong ability to determine how we act, what we're good at, and how we think. Furthermore, the differences within a sex are far greater than those between them.

Finally, as much as we like to think of sex as binary, the biology is way more complicated than that. While we think of testosterone as being a male hormone and estrogen as being female, both are present in just about everyone and hormone imbalance is a common condition. Furthermore, we have people who are XXY and some who are XY but their bodies lack the ability to process the male hormones to create male sexual features. Attempting to simplify the world into one with binary sex erases these people from existence.

Given these, I would like to suggest to game designers that they separate out sex from gender. When creating the game or the game world, be conscious of which elements would be biologically based and which would be the result of gender and gender roles in society. We don't have a great vocabulary for making the two distinct in the work itself, but if designers and developers learned to distinguish between the two, that would be a nice move, in my opinion.

For Sentient Races, Make Sex-Based Mechanics Rare

It's hard to find sex-based traits that are universal and, even with the ones that seem to be tied to sex, the differences within the group are often far greater than the differences between groups. Any limits imposed by sex will, as a result, seem arbitrary, something even Gygax pointed out when they removed sex-based ability caps.

So, when should they vary? We can all point to a number of animal species where there is obvious and clear dimorphism between males and females. Perhaps the males have horns or bright, showy colors. Carefully consider which of these differences you add to the game and, if you include any significant number of them, look at them as a whole to see if you are biasing them towards one sex over the other. For instance, if you are creating a game where the object is to go into dungeons and steal treasure from monsters, and the majority of your sex-based mechanics make it easier males to accomplish that goal, then I might suggest adding some mechanics so that female members would be better at it too.

Furthermore, by moving most of the differences from sex to gender, and having gender tied to culture, that makes sexism and gender stereotypes something characters can fight against if they wish.

Vary Your Cultures

Once we move most of the differences to gender rather than sex, it becomes easier to create an inclusive game world that supports the telling of many different types of stories. What if in culture X, the most famous military victory was won by a group of women defending their homes? How would that effect the culture as a large? Would children grow up studying the tactics used? Would there be statues and paintings of those women everywhere? What if the culture thought that only women had the patience to master math and science?

By the way, these different cultures don't have to be their own nationalities or tribes. Even within a larger group, there are often sub groups and people are often members of multiple subgroups at once. So a character's race, religion, class background, birthplace, and gender could all combine to make them unique and give them a unique set of tensions to work through (In the real world, this is part of intersectionality). What happens when someone who comes from a poor background where people use everything they can from an animal finds himself called to a religion that forbids using certain parts of the animal?

Recruit a Diverse Crew

When creating a fantasy game setting, look at the world as a whole and see that there are areas likely to be interesting to your different groups your fan community. I'd even suggest making a point of inviting and hiring people from those various groups to create parts of the world with you. No one of us can understand every perspective in the world, and hiring people from diverse perspectives helps us find our own blindspots and makes it easier to connect to those various groups. For instance, David Gaider has an excellent blog post about how a diversity of perspectives helped make Dragon Age better.

Playtest with Female Characters

As much as you can, try to get people to playtest the game with female characters. It can be hard on a read through sometimes, to find the issues that might discriminate against female characters in the game world, especially when the bias might come from an interaction between your work and the biases of your community. If much of the game text always mentions a female character's looks, that might be more obvious if you are reading it from the point of view of someone playing a female character.

What are the Male Gender Roles

If you are going to spell out female gender roles, make sure you put out there the male ones too. What are the men in society working against? Is it a belief that they have no intrinsic value? Are they taught to suppress their own desires because they must not only produce children but also provide for them and their mother(s)?

Remember, At the End of the Day, People Still Got Stuff Done

If I could leave you with only one thing to consider, it would be this. At the end of the day, women still had to get food in their stomachs, they still need some form of clothing and shelter, and, often, needed to get their sexual needs met. This is true regardless of gender. So regardless of the restrictions society attempted to place on them and their ability to do these things, those things still happened. How do they happen in your game world? Or, did you create the magical world where people never jaywalk or litter and no one tries to sneak out an extra slice of cake?

(By the way, this doesn't even begin to touch other areas such as LGBTQ.)

Image: "Fighter" © 2012 Grace D. Palmer for the Prismatic Art Collection, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Clipper Ship Lightning by Bruce Von StetinaMy group is using D&D Next as our main system for our new campaign. We did a bunch of cooperative world building and in discussing things, it turns out that they wanted more of a commerce and intrigue based campaign. We threw out a number of ideas but most people really wanted airships.

With their input, I decided to make the start of the game about the development of a new type of ship, basically an air-based clipper ship. For those who don’t know, the development of shipping in general and the clipper in particular changed the course of history. In Europe, we had the rise of merchant cities such as Venice and much of early US history and fortune is tied to trade. Shipping also caused a fair amount of disruptions to the status quo and played some role in the development of the middle class.

Clipper ships led to the development of markets for goods that are light and more perishable, such as tea and opium, as well as for passenger travel, given their faster speeds. As such, I think they’ll lend themselves nicely to many types of adventures, everything from a time-based run (like Smokey and the Bandit) to transporting contraband (Dukes of Hazard) to important matters of state, both known and unknown. Can the PCs deliver the peace treaty before the general’s planned strike? Can the spy get back in time to stop the assassination of the queen?

Once I felt confident that I could do something fun and interesting with the story line, I had to figure out how the PCs would build such a ship. Would I have them design it themselves? How would they fund the building? What I decided was that one of the characters, someone who had taken the charlatan background, won the last notebook of a noted shipbuilder during a card game. He looked it over, saw the applications of such a ship, and found some friends and acquaintances who might be interested in such an endeavor. This gave the PCs a reason to be together (and to look out for one another’s interests) and made sure no one character had more power than any other one.

Then came the decision for how to pay for the building. For that, I figured out how much they needed (20,000 gold pieces). Instead of making the rolls binary, there was a scale of money they could get with different DCs. Since there was some randomness to the amounts each round raised, the feeling is a bit more organic than saying, “I need 5 groups you borrowed money from and reasons why they lent you the money.”

I then had each of them decide who they would approach and what skills they would use to convince that group to give them money. So one PC comes for an old money family in the town who is currently involved in building ships. She had the nobility background for her character, making it reasonable that she could borrow a bunch of money. Another was from one of the rising middle class families and when the player rolled a 1, she determined that her character’s family wouldn’t have given him any money, probably saying something like “We had to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, you will too.” Another character owns a tavern in town (he’s a brewer) and has connections to the underworld. He used both legitimate and shady connections to raise the funds.

What I love about this is that one day, these groups are going to want to ask favors back. Since the players decided which groups they wanted to involve and they knew in advance that favors would be asked for at a later date, they’ve been given some control over the types of stories they want to tell. They decided that the legitimate business interests were going to be tea growers and they even want to visit some of the tea plantations to see what the deal is there. When it comes time to figure out who in the underworld provided the funds, I’ll be asking the players for their input there as well.

Also, this meant a lot less work for me. I didn’t have to come up with all of the ideas of where the story should go but I still have the opportunity to throw in a few surprises. While I realize that this won’t work for everyone, it works for me and seems to work for this group. One thing to keep in mind is that some people play D&D in a more competitive way. There’s nothing wrong with that, but since the story evolves as we tell it and the players build the world instead of competing against it, it may be less satisfying for those players.

This past weekend I was a special guest at a great convention in VT called Carnage. The crew there, including Christine Crabb, were kind enough to invite me and I had a blast.

Things to do

There was so much to do, I feel like I missed some things. For games, people had their pick of tabletop rpgs, wargames, board games, and larps. Diplomacy seemed to have a huge crowd and the Pathfinder Society room seemed to always be busy. For those who needed time away from the table, there was lots of space for socializing, a theater room with movies running around the clock, and the convention itself was held at Lake Morey Resort, with lots of outdoor trails and places to see.

Highlights of the Trip

Running two games of "Dream a little dream of death" was a ton of fun. I created the scenario for DDXP two years ago and it never disappoints. There's nothing like obvious injustice and a mystery to figure out. I need to figure out how to write it up for other people to run it but none of the current adventure templates seem to work well for it.

Another big highlight was just sitting around and chatting with people. The convention is very family friendly and I believe about 20% or so of the attendees were women. The people I met were very interested in making sure everyone felt welcome. Whatever they are doing worked because I felt at home right away. Everyone was friendly and I had lots of great conversations about games.

The Future

If I recall correctly, the convention has been around for about 15 years. They celebrated their 10th year at Lake Morey and next year they will be at Killington, VT. If you live in the New England area, I recommend checking it out.

Rook by Jared von HindmanA lot of great discussion has happened since yesterday’s article
Minotaurs, Udders, and Worries of Gender Stereotyping. It seems that two of my points about bias might have been lost a bit beneath all the other words so I’d like to talk about them here. Both of these biases individually and together reinforce the idea that the female is “The Other.” This feeling of otherness can drive away some players, particularly women who are unsure if the game is right for them. So I think it merits examining these issues a bit more.

Female as Marked

What is “marked?” Here’s a basic definition from "Marked Women, Unmarked Men" by Deborah Tannen.

The term “marked” is a staple of linguistic theory. It refers to the way language alters the base meaning of a word by adding a linguistic particle that has no meaning on its own. The unmarked form of a word carries the meaning that goes without saying -- what you think of when you're not thinking anything special.

Notice in Jon Schindehette’s article, there was no discussion of what defines a male minotaur. In fact, we rarely discuss what defines males of any race (although we might talk about average height, weight, etc) This is because we consider the male to be the default and the female to be the exception or “marked” condition.

Now at least one commenter argued that this is because there is an overlap in male characteristics, in that both minotaur and human have a penis, but there is a difference in location of the female mammary glands, and, thus, we need to discuss this. However, the issue here is that both breasts and udder on a fantasy creature could be just as easily hidden as a penis often is. There’s no reason to believe that a muscular minotaur wouldn’t be flat chested and have her breasts covered by a hairy chest. Likewise, lower body coverings could easily cover an udder and, if the minotaur tends to be naked instead, then whatever covers the penis could cover the udder as well. As a construct of the human imagination, we can create this creature however we wish. That we believe the male intimate areas would not be noticeable but the female ones would is part of this bias towards marking women.

Omniscient Breasts

Another part of our bias is focusing on the mammary glands as a way to mark femaleness. While there is a fair bit of variation due to time period and location, heterosexual males often (but not always) have a bit of a fascination with breasts. That’s one of the reasons why the “male gaze” often focuses on them as an important body part. However, this way of looking at the female body is far from universal. Kate Elliott explores this in her post, The Omniscient Breasts. Focusing on breasts as the way to distinguish a female character can easily run into this problem. In my opinion, it fetishizes them and takes them out of the context of the character as a whole.

In addition, I’d suggest that this may be one of the main reasons we end up with characters that look like they’ve had a boob job and are dressed in clothing that shows off their breasts, such as boob plate, corsets, and boob windows. I can see the thought process now: “Well, they told me they want a female character and that female characters of this race are distinguished by their breasts....If I draw the breasts too small, they might not be noticeable, so, to make sure I don’t have to redo any of my work, I better create the fantasy art outfit equivalent of big neon signs that say ‘HERE THERE BE BREASTS!’” If your intention is to cut down on artists depicting women in this fashion (and I’ve heard multiple times from multiple people that it is), perhaps telling them that breasts are the way to define a character is counter-productive.

Being Aware

The main reason I wrote yesterday's article and this one is that I think we should be aware of the biases not only that we hold but that exist in what we consume. Being aware of a bias doesn't mean that we must stamp out all occurrences of it. As Elliott discusses in her article, there are times to write a character using a "heterosexual male gaze" point of view, just as there are times we should use the "heterosexual female" or others. Rather, it's a check to make sure that we are using the one that aligns best with the story we are trying to tell. In the case of D&D Next, I'd hope that game material that discusses races and classes clings more to a gender neutral perspective than some previous editions have.