Gender Rolls

Last Friday night, I was hanging out with my brother Eric and my friend John, playing some D&D. (Well, actually it was a D&D adaptation of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, but that's beside the point.) Since The Wheel of Time deals a lot with gender, I decided it would be a good opportunity for me to try something I'd never ever done before: play a female character.

Afterward, I was struck by the fact that such a decision should not have been anything unusual. I've played dwarves, monsters, vampires, elves, demigods, and wizards. I've played people from other countries (both real and fictional); I've played as warriors and mages, saints and sinners, the faithful, the faithless, and even the insane. But despite my eagerness to learn about roles and society by playing them out, there was always a slight hesitation, a sense of unease at the thought of playing a woman.

Why should this be? I wondered. Am I afraid of showing any feminine qualities? Am I secretly sexist or something? (I do this to myself all the time. I have no idea why.)

But nobody I know (at least, nobody I play with) has ever, to my knowledge, played any character not of their own gender. In a game where you could play as literally anyone, become virtually anything, why is it that so many players refuse to step outside their own gender, when they would eagerly play a character of a different race, religion, status, socioeconomic background, profession, alignment, age, and even species? This seems like an odd line to be unwilling to cross.



(Maybe they just don't want to deal with
having to actually roleplay the clothes.)

Many players might argue that "I'm a man, and therefore I don't know how a woman would think, so I just won't play as a woman." Well, yeah, but you play as dwarves all the time, and no one knows how they think! They don't even exist!

Hang on, maybe I just hit the nail on the head.

Since no one knows how a dwarf would act, no one can accuse you of getting it wrong, or of being culturally insensitive. You're free to make it up as you go, rather than having to mimic reality.

Then again, maybe players are simply afraid of getting it too right. The players of tabletop RPGs are for the most part male, and dislike showing any side of themselves that might be labeled "feminine", for fear of setting off a wave of all-too-familiar hetero-normative panic.

A fourth option: most tabletop RPGs are created by male designers, with a largely-male audience in mind. As a result, RPGs tend (in both theory and practice) towards a male perspective and a male play-style. From a tween or teenage boy's perspective, a female character lacks the strength for how he wants to play (i.e., hack-and-slash), and her social skills would appear irrelevant and "lame" to him.

But I have noticed an interesting corollary to the above observation: playing a female character is not at all uncommon among the male players of MMOs like "World of Warcraft". Perhaps this is because online play tends to involve very little roleplaying, so boys don't feel like they're required to "act all girly" if they do choose to play a female.

Is this a sign that boys of today are more comfortable with female roles? Or does it suggest that our boys increasingly view women's bodies as objects, as pretty shapes to stare at while they run around an online environment?

Only time will tell.

In Defense of LARPers

The other day, Brianna's friend Nicky was asking me about "Vampire," and how the game works. One of the questions she asked was whether or not we dress up and act out the parts. I told her no, we don't do LARPing (Live-Action Role-Playing).

"That's one bridge we don't want to cross," I said.


Suddenly (and quite unexpectedly), Brianna told me that I was being unfair to LARPers, and should stop making fun of them. She told me that I'm constantly ridiculing LARPers for their passion, and that since I spend my Wednesday nights pretending to be a vampire (who spends his time in the library, no less), I didn't have a rhetorical leg to stand on. I confessed that I hadn't realized how often I denigrated LARPers, but that they were just "weird", and "way too into it."



Brianna's first contact with the phenomenon of LARPing came from the movie Role Models, so she approached LARPing from a more positive angle than most people do. To her, LARPing and traditional tabletop RPGs are just different points on a continuum of nerdyness. In fact, she said, LARPers always look like they're having a blast, doing what they love, and getting sunlight, fresh air, and exercise. Who am I to ridicule them for doing what they love?

The intensity of the verbal drubbing I received forced me to open my eyes. I realized that I was not only being unfair to LARPers, but to all nerds, and even to my personal philosophy of nerdyness.

Brianna was right. I am being unfair to LARPers. They've never done anything to harm or hurt me, and they don't bother anyone. All they do is have fun with their friends, in the way they most enjoy. And there's nothing wrong with that.



So from now on, I will do my level best never to make fun of LARPers again. They've done nothing wrong, and all nerds must stand together if we're going to gain any kind of widespread acceptance of our passions and hobbies.

The End of the World

Yesterday morning, at about 8:00 AM, the series finale of The Masks of the Damned came to its long-awaited conclusion. The final episode clocked in at just under 12 hours. That's way too long for any TV show, even a long-running soap-opera, but it's not an unheard-of length for a tabletop role-playing game. Which is what it was.

For almost exactly one year, The Masks of the Damned has been a collaborative effort in group improvisational storytelling, and the brainchild of my good friend and former roommate Ian Murray. Ian will shortly be leaving for grad school in Buffalo, New York, which is why the series had to come to an end.

But what an end it was! Nothing else can come close to the nail-biting intensity of a long-running RPG's final session, partly because the viewer can't just sit back and watch how things will unfold. If you make the wrong move, it could spell doom for not just your beloved character, but all other viewers as well (and by extension, their characters, too). Audience-involvement is a must.

For those of you who don't know, The Masks of the Damned utilizes White Wolf's Dark Ages: Vampire setting, and takes place in medieval Krakow, in (roughly) the Year of Our Lord 1230. Not many people know this, but at that time, Krakow was something unheard-of in medieval Europe: a democracy. Granted, it was democratic only for a small group of powerful noblemen and landowners, but it was a step in the right direction.

Anyway, at the opening of the final night's chapter, the city had been under siege by Hungarians for about a week, taking heavy losses by night when the invaders' vampiric masters awoke, and laid their own siege with Tzimisce [chim-EET-see] war-ghouls. In the midst of a major battle, Nicodemus, the former ruler of vampiric Krakow, reappeared and announced that he had come to reclaim what was rightfully his. Instantly, the city began to tremble, and a titanic dragon erupted from beneath the royal palace: a dragon formed of thousands upon thousands of human corpses, bound together and given an unholy life by blasphemous magics. The beast raced with shocking speed to the Eastern Gate, preparing to smash the city walls and allow the Hungarians access to the defenseless, sleeping city.

I don't think I've ever heard of a more epic final battle, which took place on the dragon's freaking back as it raced through the city. Imagine the final battle in Army of Darkness, but instead of taking place in a castle, it takes place ON GODZILLA'S BACK, WHILE HE'S IN THE PROCESS OF DESTROYING TOKYO!!!

During said battle, the fighters held their own against a powerful Tzimisce named Lazarus, who wore a suit of armor made from his own skeleton, and dealt unhealable damage! Oh yeah, and he could fly. Meanwhile, the weak-armed mages (i.e., just me) attacked the beast's weak points with burning barrels of tar, trying to cripple its' legs before it could crush the rest of the city.

Oh, and did I mention that, for all intents and purposes, the dragon had INFINITE HIT POINTS!?!?!?! And that it was almost ONE-HUNDRED FEET TALL at the shoulder?!?!?! And that as you climbed us its body, the uncountable hands and mouths of all those corpses would bite and rake and claw at you?!?!?!?!

It was an epic battle to end all epic battles.

But then came the True Final Boss!

I believe I mentioned earlier that Nicodemus, Krakow's former ruler, had returned? Well, we had to fight him. Immediately. He made a brutally difficult boss: he was older than dirt, he could fly, cast tons of magic, turn himself into a gravity-defying puddle of blood, use telekinesis, fill entire rooms with nigh-impenetrable darkness, hold hundreds of gallons of blood in his body, and knew a spell that could collapse people's skeletons at will!!! For a mortal, having your ribcage collapsed would be instantly fatal. For us, it just made us loose half the blood in our bod-- Oh, wait. When you're fighting someone tougher than the fucking Antichrist, loosing half your ammo is pretty much fatal, too.

Normally, a boss like that would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. But do you remember how, mere minutes previous, Lazarus dealt most of us a ton of unhealable damage? Things were not looking good for the heroes of Krakow.

It was only in the last minutes, hemmed in, badly wounded, low on blood, and still unable to deal a single point of damage, that we came across a possible solution: Wolfgang (my character) still had a dagger on his person. A dagger with a spring-loaded poison chamber. A poison that had proved devastating to vampires in the past. I drew it from my pocket, and checked how much ammo it had.

It had one. dose. left.

Using my own limited flight powers, I took to the air and made a final desperate stab at the seemingly-invulnerable Elder Vampire. I rolled a seven. If that result had been one point lower, we all (probably) would have died then and there. (Which is not to say that I was the only one pulling my weight in the life-saving department; every character had more than a few brilliant ideas and close brushes with Final Death. This particular one just happened to be mine.)

With the successful application of the poison, Nicodemus was badly hurt, and we were eventually able to subdue him. The Page (an extremely powerful child-vampire of indeterminate gender) who had been sitting in his/her/its throne and watching the battle, congratulated us on our unlikely success, but reminded us that, in becoming the rulers, heroes, and villains of Krakow, we had nothing left to do but train our replacements, and know that one day, we too would be overthrown.

'Twas a very bittersweet ending, but what else can one expect from the chronicles of the Living Damned?

Heere endeth ye tale of Ye Masques of ye Damned.

P.S. IAN, WE WILL MISS YOU!