Gender in RPGs
Some time ago, I read a story about a GM running a pre-written adventure. This GM decided to tweak the adventure as written, by gender swapping every NPC. His (exclusively male) players found it odd that they only met one man. As the game went on, they became increasingly paranoid that the women were doing something to the men.
When the GM wrote about the experience, he said that he didn’t think the gender of the players was relevant. He assumed an all-female player group would have had a similar reaction.
A friend disagreed, and recalled watching a sci-fi film, which included a shot of pilots running to their craft. The pilots were a roughly even split of men and women. Her reaction was visceral, because she could see herself among those pilots. It was a minor background detail, but it had a huge impact on her.
My friend’s reaction shows why representation matters, and even a small change can make a large difference. If you’ve always seen yourself represented in media, you may not understand it, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
I’ve tried to have a diverse mix of NPCs in my games for years. More recently, I’ve started tracking these things in a spreadsheet. As well as the overall gender mix, I track the mix of villains and allies, and an idea of their level. An equal split of men and women isn’t great if all the women are villains, or the men are all more powerful than the women.
An example spreadsheet, in LibreOffice and Excel formats, can be downloaded below. It has sheets with NPCs for two games I’ve run recently - 7th Sea and Star Trek Adventures, but the spreadsheet can be easily adapted to whatever system you’re using.
The Star Trek Adventures tab also has species, which illustrates how other things can also be tracked using the same spreadsheet. This could just as easily be used to track sexual orientation, for instance.