RE: Digest Number 285

From: A. K. Berner <open_micro_at_...>
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 17:20:36 -0500

After lurking for quite some time on this debate about sexism and the lack of viable options for women characters I feel that, after reading TR, there is some truth to the idea that women are portrayed on balance throughout the current HW books to be more 'support' than hero. Do I think there is anything wrong with this? No, it is indeed realistic for a Dark Ages setting. I see nothing wrong with creating an unusual woman warrior character if I wish to play a woman (and often do). From day one of my 25 years of RPG experience I have felt that it is all about playing characters that are far from the mainstream of society. It is great that Issaries is setting a realistic baseline that is 'normal' so as to make the cool women who buck the trend all that much more interesting.

I think that the main thing that is bugging a lot of the people, including me, was summed-up by the guy who said that it reminded him of the person who came last to the D&D sessions being punished by having to play the cleric. Why do clerics tend to be boring to play? Mostly because sitting around patching people up feels too much like real work to be fun. A zillion people have jumped in saying that combat doesn't have to be, or shouldn't be a focus for RPGs. TOUGH, it is. And that goes for both men and woman players. Even in games that tend to appeal much more to woman than men (like Vampire and other WW titles) there is plenty of combat between the talking parts. Being a medic may be fine for ER where the show is all about emergency medicine and interpersonal relationship between sexy people, but I don't really see that this is a realistic sort of tone to enstill into a Dark Ages fantasy RPG. Look as shows like Xena, Hercules, or read just about any fantasy book ever written. How many 'healers' are main characters in these books. Even Gabrielle in Xena who started off as a sort of healer character ended up whipping out the Sais after a few seasons.

In summary, I think it is great that Issaries setup a nice normal baseline for a world setting. Whatever imbalances exist in the culture are totally irrelavant to the heroes since they can do whatever they want, that is what makes them heroes! This is what could have been stated more clearly in TR; particularly in the 'getting started' sections. That this is met to be more backstory stuff and that player characters can, and should, do whatever is FUN. That is the purpose of RPGs.

As to you people who keep pushing this idea that combat is not central to RPGs, give it up. Never was true, isn't true now, never will be true. Sure, it is not the ONLY thing that makes RPGs great, but it is always important enough that a character that cannot participate in it will usually be a bore to play in a long campaign. And you can hold on to your anecdotes too, anything can be fun under the right mitigating circumstances. I, and most of the people who are bugged by this, are obviously speaking for the general case.

Cheers!!

A.K. Berner

BTW: Good points on modern feminism Ian. We need more like you =)