A while ago I decided to remove other races than human from playable characters, but it doesn't make a lot of sense. Also you can only play as male character. But now I have new plans to distribute professions to several humanoid type creatures and also for different genders. The idea is that you can't play let's say a female knight. It's silly and I hate games where gender is simply a choice for "equality" reasons.
Female professions will be exclusive for females and I think they are going to be more difficult if not even iron man (the irony...) style characters.
Well, the actual news is that I've finally started to complete the gameplay features. I have a "plan" for almost everything, but as in case of professions they have to be complete with all features. It's hard work to get that done (and I hate working).
Professions is an interesting topic. I think the idea of professions is much more realistic than traditional RPG classes. It's also a nice way to develop your world narrative, when players choose from a list of professions, they see the other options they have and that gives them an idea about the kind of work they are playing in. A list which includes courtesan and poet reveals a very different game from one which includes pit-fighter or sanitation engineer. But yes, there is the question of whether to have professions be separate from gender or not.
ReplyDeleteActually even our own rather chauvinist RL culture had Female knights, though they were more of a support class.
http://www.heraldica.org/topics/orders/wom-kn.htm
Traditionally Sci-fi and Fantasy genres were used by novelists to experiment with different kinds of social systems, sometimes ideal, other times not. Although they lost some of this in the 70's and 80's there continues to be a kind of tradition of racial and gender equality, partially just to avoid offending potential readers or players, because with these genres inclusion of such social ills has become an artistic choice, and really who would create a world from scratch and intentionally fill it with racism and sexism?
Of course some new writers are doing just that (what people call "grimdark" fantasy) in order to spark discussion about the topics. And unfortunately video games have inherited a lot of unpleasant baggage along with their visual style which has it's roots in comic books and B-movies (deeply sexist and often misogynistic depictions of women).
It's your game, so it's your choice about what kind of world you build. it could even be that you leave gender undefined, since it's a roguelike and much about roguelikes only exists in the player's imagination anyway. We don't define the player's eye color or shoe size (unless it has some effect on game play, like you can't wear the goblin's boots of teleportation because your feet are too big) so unless you're going to make it an issue you could always leave it out and just let people choose a player sprite from a list which includes female and male depictions of heroes.
It's not how you trying to think it is. The role of gender in Kaduria is based on reality more than fantasy. Its model is loosely "medieval" which means the role of woman is not egalitarian as we know it in today's western society. When there are exactly the same professions for women in a RPG it's called "fantasy" for a good reason.
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