Have you considered determining NPC gender randomly?
Have you considered determining NPC gender randomly?
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 have always done this randomly since 1977. I was a kid but my mom and godmother were huge ERA supporters and it just seemed correct.
Yes. I use chat AI for this kind of thing, you can ask it to generate a table and then roll on the table, or just generate a list of NPCs and ask for a % representation of people.
How well does chat AI do when it comes to representation?
One huge flaw of AI-based systems I keep on hearing about is that they tend to repeat the biases of their training data.
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
Yes, when prepare NPC I always have dice determine gender/species/culture/etc to avoid my own biases. On the spot I atleast try to determine gender randomly.
Though I understand for gender, I think a lot of those depend a lot on the setting.
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
@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. 😉
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!
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 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.
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 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.
I'm genderfluid, I write whoever I wanna.
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.