At some point in the past, I noticed that I had a strong tendency to make NPCs male, even though there wasn’t any good story or setting-specific reason to do so. From gods to villains to random shopkeepers - most of these were assigned male without me even realizing that I have been doing it.
Thus, I started to assign genders by the roll of a dice - and I am fairly pleased with the results as this made the world significantly more diverse.
How about you? Have you noticed any similar biases in your own NPCs - and if so, what did you do about this?
I am no fan of random generation, but I try to have a proper gender balance, and found that gender swapping cliché is a good way to re-use them, the stupid prince worried about his hair, the lady knight
When I ran games in high school most of my NPCs were male because my horny friends would always try and hook up with the women.
Now I do not mention gender unless it is relevant. I do need to add some non-cis, non-binary npcs.
My thoughts is make the characters first there backstory and everything then roll for gender, as if I did gender first I would feel like I draw more towards stereotype of that gender. As one gender does not define who someone is. And this way they all seem more diverse and more alive that way.
@thezeesystem @juergen_hubert GREAT idea!
@dazflorplebam @thezeesystem @juergen_hubert I’ve started doing this, it leads to more vibrant NPCs.
@juergen_hubert
Actually, I have.That chart is mixing gender and sexual orientation, by the way. May look fun at first glance, but less so if you look at it a little linger IMO. 😉
Finally, a use for my d17!
I’m currently GMing Cyberpunk (because I can’t convince my group to play Shadowrun), and there are a couple of modules that use gender politics as part of their hook and background. I don’t want to mess with those because I feel like it adds to the credibility of the world.
Overall, I tend to make mostly female NPCs. To avoid that, I assign gender based on who they will appear with. If the leader of a faction is female, their sidekick is male. When male driver 1 passes the group to driver 2, driver 2 is female.
I did this in a novel I wrote, actually. I assigned TLA ‘names’ based on their job (ENG, PIL, etc), and any time a gender would normally be referenced in the text I used XXX - both for easy searching. I got about 70% of the way through when my beta readers rebelled - they absolutely HAD TO KNOW what gender everybody was. Sigh.
But by this time the characters’ personalities and speech patterns were well established, so I flipped a coin for each one, and continued onward. I’ll probably do this again some day and just ignore the beta readers.
I’m genderfluid, I write whoever I wanna.
