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It's not discrimination, it's historical [22 Dec 2006|10:24am] So there's this thread on roleplayers where a woman is asking for advice about dealing with sexism in the Dungeons and Dragons game she plays. Along with some interesting discussion and good advice about talking to the gamemaster, I noticed variants of a couple of the Great Excuses for Sexism in Gaming: It happens to men too It's appropriate for the setting Maybe later, if I think my brain is up to the bleeding, I'll go dig up one of the many RPGnet threads about gender issues in a game and find Great Excuses 3 through n. Right now, I'm thinking about #2, where objecting to sexism in any vaguely historical setting is unreasonable because "that's the way it really was." I say vaguely because the connection to history can be very loose. For example, in the above-mentioned discussion, the setting of the game was "inspired by the Roman Empire although with some significant differences," and the poster mentioned that soon the group would be heading into the Underdark--which, unless the Underdark has changed a lot in later editions of D&D, is straight-up fantasy. (She also mentioned that the change would be nice because of the "strong powerful women" in the Underdark, but for this post I've decided to avoid the yawning conversational abyss posed by the evil black matriarchy of elves she's talking about.) So, basically, if your fantasy setting sat on a shelf next to a 7th-grade history textbook at some point in its life, it's historical enough that traditional gender roles "should" be in place. ( My thoughts ) 25 comments|post comment

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