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?
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.
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. 😉
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 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 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
I’m genderfluid, I write whoever I wanna.
I have a random NPC generator tables I made. I have a 1d8 for gender (1 is androgynous female and 8 is androgynous Male, the rest are male and female). I tend to have certain races more androgynous and gender bending than others. I also have height, clothes, hair, eyes and body. Similar tables with some personality traits.
For race I have a 1d100 table for my major regions. The 1d100 let’s me get small percentages of rarer species and allows me to create groups. So for the current area 70% are from the region with 60% being the top three races and the remaining 10% being atypical. The remaining 30% are broken down by nearby regions and foreigners. This lets me customize each section and roll on subsections of the table if I have to.
I always race, mostly roll gender and everything else is optional. The gender, appearance, and personality tables are universal and I have made few race tables for the campaign. They are useful tools to have created and to use
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.
