Thanks for all the nice messages. It's so great to share in all the love I've been feeling. I've been compelled to poetry, even, with how my sweet girl has been making me feel.


I haven't experienced that myself, but I've only ran in a tiny handful of games with friends.

Also, I do mean TTRPG characters when I say "RPG characters" of my own creation. I'm still a little too shy/embarrassed to go for a self-waifu character in a video game.

Speaking personally, when I make a character for a TTRPG, I approach it the same way I do when writing. I choose an identity based on what feels right to me for the character. Probably about two thirds of the characters I've played have been male, but I've been perfectly comfortable playing other genders, as well. The character I'm making for my group's next game is a cis female widow, for instance.

A couple of the players have said that they themselves are not comfortable playing other genders, although they've never expressed any issue with anyone else doing so.

Wait, you kind of lost me. The 2/20 ratio refers to ttrpgs, but you only ran "a tiny handful of games with friends". Does this mean you consider 20 games very few* (because maybe you usually play one-shots), you generally player with strangers, you make way more characters then those you actually get to play...?

*that doesn't seem few at all to me because that's less than how many PCs I have files for in my laptop - granted, not all my characters are saved there, my group(s) usually play long-term campaigns, and I GM semi-regularly so I don't have as many characters as others in my group do - and again, I do find myself more interested in RPing women.

That reminds me: I have a short-ish, very self-contained 5e campaign set in pre-Decamillennial Ravnica called Escape Lab; I don't have the maps in digital format, tho, so it wouldn't be too ready to be played online (yet?)


I'm for some reason reminded of the s***post I've heard on tumblr saying "every OC is either kin or kink" xD

("kin" in this context hints/pokes fun at otherkins, people that believe to have had past lives as fictional characters or at least identify very strongly with them. Kink should be fairly obvious)

Anyway, you mean in mmorpgs? Because who's there to judge you in single players beside yourself... who can be, depending on people and situations, a right bastard, so I'd understand regardless tbh. In most games, your character is the one you'll look most at during your experience, so it makes sense to me to choose an appearance you find appealing, be it for comfort and/or attraction. I like women, I'm comfy RPing them, I don't see the problem. I mostly play single players, but that's been true for the few mmorpgs I played as well - it's not a bad thing to like the ass you're going to have on screen for, like, 80% of the time


Makes sense! It depends on the writing process as well, I think, as well as the mindspace one enters when RPing. For me in both cases there's a fair amount of channeling various parts of my identity, so


Most people I play with rarely, if ever, play other genders, and it's kind of a running joke that a few friends see my female characters as "me [beard and all] with tits" and other supposedly hilarious stuff along those lines which, while not necessarily mean-spirited, make me kind of uneasy. I do like to retaliate no-selling any "joke" regarding my characters taking dick (because, of course, that's the issue ) with a deadpan/cheerful "yes, and...?" just to see them squirm, to be honest.*

*The most egregious example was someone joking about that in a campaign based on ancient Greece, of all cultures

One of my favorite characters I've played was a female in a kind-of post-apocalyptic setting. She was very sexual, partly because she had been in a street gang wherein her role was to seduce/lure victims. She also had a love of her life, her boyfriend, who she spent the first half of the campaign searching for and finally found (they had been separated by circumstance before the campaign started). Once they were reunited, my character would frequently make sexual innuendos to him. For example, one time he was working on a vehicle and trying to loosen a rusted bolt when my character wanted to talk to him over radio, and I ended the conversation with "Okay, well, try not to bust a nut down there."

I do, in general, get very into my characters while RPing, so things like their sexuality tends to come pretty naturally to me.

Sorry, I guess I made an assumption with how I phrased myself. To be absolutely clear:

I have played (not including the 1 game I tried to run myself) in a grand total of 5 games, three of which only ran for like 2 sessions.

I have a bunch of characters which I have never played -- and am frankly scared to play a majority of them, more for social anxiety and repression than anything else -- because there's 15 years of (legal) free content for Pathfinder 1e and that's just the kind of theorycrafting-deckbuilding-shenanigans that give my brain the serotonin.

Only a single one of those 20 or so characters have I brought to a table: Alexandrite, whom I believe I talked about once before, which was a female brawler type character who turned out to be into women and (due to a cointoss) slept in the nude.


That last line is the bit I have the big issue with, still being quite repressed. I cannot help but judge myself for wanting to play the girl character because I find her hot/attractive. I am so scared of being any kind of "that guy" that I hold myself back from what I enjoy.

Also, I don't even think I've played any MMORPGs, period, I'm talking about video games across spectrums as innocent as Pokémon, as animé as Monster Hunter, as obscuring as Dark Souls. I'm *starting* to accept the idea, but 90% of the time I've played female avatars it's been for replay value after playing through as the male.


This kind of thing is both what I seem to be drawn to -- with one example character being a sorceress geisha assassin with a "tramp stamp" that's actually her familiar in ink form on her skin -- but I am terrified of actually playing those types of characters. Given where my writing has gone lately, I'm tempted to do the meme thing and take these RPG characters and writing a story with them rather than braving the anxiety to play them as a character.

Ah, I see. Can I offer a turn of perspective? With the recent breakthrough you made about yourself, feminine avatars might also be closer to your gender flavor, so to speak; since being pretty/cute/attractive there is your choice, why shouldn't you take that chance? I get that self-image issues might open a separate can of worms here, but from an ethical perspective there's no downside in appreciating your own alter ego

(this is especially relevant in contexts where there is no audience that might misconstrue your intent, as with single players - and btw, the That Guy descriptor is rather inaccurate for obvious reasons even before any behavior of yours is taken into account )

So being a very boring flavor myself I'm not sure how intelligently I can comment on the topic, but I can comment on my gaming experience.

When it comes to TTRPGs I usually GM which as made me very comfortable playing more or less everything. I'm more concerned about the character's own archetype. This is perhaps because even as a player I tend to view my TTRPG characters as "A separate character I am controlling" (like JRPG characters that have pre-written personalities) rather than "Me" (as seems to be the expectation for western RPG video games with in depth character creators).

Which brings me to those topics. When I'm playing a video game where the Player Character has their own name and personality, I'm fairly comfortable with male and female characters alike. In fact, I've often taken closer looks at games with the "Female protagonist" tag because in my experience there are two reasons for that, and it's usually pretty easy to tell them apart because one is "Fanservice" and the other is "The writers put a lot of thought into this character". Because, really, Male or AFGNCAAP (Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person) are still the defaults since there's a perception which may not be true anymore that most heavier gamers are male. So a divergence from that is usually for cause. That said, when I play a game that has you make your own character in detail (which is rare. I hated Elder Scrolls Oblivion, never touched Skyrim or the Fallout series... those are a lot of big names) I usually either make a very baseliner dude or go really out there with something I think is cool like a robot or weird alien creature. Maybe I'd have more fun if I took my TTRPG approach to these games but really I've seldom enjoyed western-style RPGs anyway.

Similarly, if I'm just playing a game like later Pokemons that wants you to pick between two avatars I'm almost always going to pick the male avatar and not really think about it. Like Luna I might go for the female avatar for a second playthrough to see if anything's different. (especially for, say, Fire Emblem games where there could be huge differences in dynamics)

The exception is World of Warcraft, which is a bit of a funny story. I started out playing a Male Dwarf Paladin. I got lost in the show outside ironforge, couldn't climb the slope back to the road (too steep) and couldn't find the proper way up and didn't know about my hearthstone. In a rage I went back to the creator and decided to make the most opposite character from that I could and turned up a female Blood Elf Mage. Who I played from BC through Legion. In BFA I needed to switch to Alliance so I could join my wife's guild on account of my Horde raiding guild falling apart, and by then I was taking WoW unseriously enough to just go with a reference character. Thus I made a Female Void Elf Monk named Ozen, for whom I've been trying to get a fitting cosmetic set of items (For anyone else who still plays, shado pan rep is a pain to get post-mists and it's gating the best hat). I'm not good at maintaining multiple characters, but my best Alliance alternate is a Male Void Elf Mage named Bondrewd, also with items to look like the Made in Abyss character. Are references high grade RP? Hell no, but when my name gets called out by the NPC in an epic speech it at least sounds better than when it's xxNoobslayer420xx being lauded publicly.

I want to build on what Huey said in one way though: if you're playing a single player game where no one is watching, there is zero reason to be ashamed of enjoying fanservicey aspects. The creators intended the fans to be served; if that sort of content exists, you're honoring the makers by enjoying it.

Real life HS!Sumner: one-handed controller

I mean, I guess, but I've still got a long ways to go in many respects. Tho, I won't deny that sometimes I see a character such as Blaze from Streets of Rage 4 and wanna make the joke "this is the ideal physical form".


Cheeky


I don't often get games with character creators, either, but I have two modes: spend 2 sessions worth of game time customizing a character, or Monster Factory. I tend to default to Monster Factory nowadays because time is precious. From Soft games are pretty good at Monster Factory


The question for me kind of becomes, was I always so hyper aware of what I was choosing because of unrealized questions of gender, or was it one of those autistic/social-anxiety things? Because I cannot remember a time when I chose between a male and female model without thinking about it.



I get what you're saying, but it's hard growing out of the repressed culture I was raised in. None of my family was ever religious, but they definitely kept the puritanical nature of their times -- as a reminder there's 15 years between my brother and I and there was another 15 years between my mother and father; I was raised a generation in the past. Besides being raised with a "sex is bad" mentality, raising myself on the internets means I've also been exposed to all the worst neckbeardery and just been hyper-aware that I need to not be that way.


BUT! I think we've gotten off-track here. My sweet girl Eta has me actually thinking about going out to visit her in St. Louis! *panic emoji* I'm still kinda terrified of both flying and conventions (the easiest excuse to go out somewhere), not to mention the other things I'd have to worry about like my family guilting me over not visiting them but going out for something like a convention. I'm also worried right now about getting out of my current job because it's just getting worse, but also thinking I should be in the market for a new car because of my own vehicular troubles and maybe sticking with it for the steady income, but also I just want to do a less stressful career and a friend pointed out that "people pay money" for a little translation thingy I did, or copyediting which I find myself doing for a different friend's draft now, but I know how difficult it can be to make a comfortable career out of those things so I don't know what to do with myself

I still so desperately want to see more of her. She inspires me to poetry (special shoutout to Raven for his help with my latest one)

Yeah ofc, to each their own pace.


Please explain where's the joke, that's facts


Well, things rarely happen for a single reason; those two factors might have been relevant from the very beginning with different levels of awareness and relevance. Unless the answer has some tangible consequence, trying to distinguish between the two might be little more than a philosophical exercise.


Nice! I hope you manage to visit without too many complications. Since I'm going through a bit of a crisis myself, I won't engage too much with the tangle of possibilities, sorry


!

apoigna;sfdgliujapsdfAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Last night I stayed up late to help my sweet girl compose her resumé -- something which was so big and daunting that she was putting it off for like weeks. It's her first job so it's scary but she was offered it by a friend who's vouching for her skills and know-how (which to me seems amazing because she can do so much coding and programming that goes over my head), and I helped her to overcome her anxiety and self-doubt. By letting her gush over her projects at me she made a list 20-something items long of things she's done, which she then could pick and choose the most relevant ones for the position. I never thought it would be so nice, having my own experience with the heavy anxiety of resumés and new jobs, but helping her get this has honestly put a smile on my face.

Not just that, now I'm doing something I never thought I'd do: networking. Not for her, but for another friend who asked for a beta reader. I must obviously be in the wrong career for myself, because the thought of purposefully networking like I've been told to do is disgusting but here I'm helping someone else by doing just that!