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 tend to have my players interact with women or NBs because I’m self conscious about doing voices for men. But I’ve found that I definitely have some internal biases when it comes to certain things. Guard captains are almost always male, hospitality industry is usually female, etc etc.
Always trying to be aware of that and challenge those biases.
Another good question is about age, too. It seems like almost everyone is in the 20-40s range because that’s easier. But it’s a lot of fun to throw different age groups out there.
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.
I’m genderfluid, I write whoever I wanna.
That’s usually my go to starting point into making an OC. I just spin the weel on a bunch of arbitrary trait and mold the character based on how they would be in the world.
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
Finally, a use for my d17!
@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. 😉
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.
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.
I roll on a table for sex and gender when making random NPCs. If I don’t, I’ll design the entire character without ever assigning any of that and won’t realize it until playtime.
