While I agree with Bugreporter that characters with their own sexual orientation feels more realistic/alive, I can justify such practice ONLY if you able to create atleast 2 distinct RO characters for EACH possible sexual orientation. Otherwise, you taken away either romance feature for some players, or ability to CHOOSE from some options while enjoying said feature…
And since it’s unproportionaly large amount of work for most COG stories, I find Ro’s with fluid gender and/or sexual orientation be decent alternative. In that case you probably should add some unique features/scenes, that activates only with male or only with female version of said RO, or only with specific orientation. This will make them more unique than just “alternative sex/gender versions” of each other.
That said, if you feel that in your story this characters absolutely SHOULD be this way, no one could stop you. It’s your creation, after all.
I have to agree here. I like maximum choice of ROs, and therefore, I like it when ROs are MC-sexual/romantic, even at the cost of maintaining realism.
The way I am dealing with the issue in my current COG-in-progress is to have four ROs who can all be attracted to the MC; any of them can be a man or a woman based on player choice. It is not a perfect solution, but it is the one that I settled on for this project.
While I’m very happy about decidedly bi-/pansexual representation, if your characters only work for you with a different sexuality I say go for it.
Ultimatively it’s your story, those are your characters, you should be able to recognize them and if you can’t do that when making them bi-/pansexual, I say give them a different orientation. (It also would probably avoid that your other characters end up being playersexual instead of bi/pan…their orientation would seem more defined if it’s not just here for the player’s sake I think?).
And as long as nobody will end up with no/only one RO it’s anyway no problem…though there are games that work well even with only one RO depending on preferences so I guess it depends where you want to go with the romance in your story? Is it a huge part of the story? Or the only close relationship the MC can build? (please don’t do that, I would take a Bff path over a RO that I don’t like but is the only one available every day.)
I don’t want my characters in the story to be immediately romancable, I never like the option to immediately flirt with someone because it’s just not how romance works. Usually. I don’t know, I’m far too socially inept to actually try flirting with people it scares me too much.
My story is equal parts character and plot-centric, and I want that to show in the telling of it. You can’t just walk up to these characters and start flirting with them (well, there is an exception, but he’s a completely different can of worms), they have too much on their plate and, frankly, romance probably isn’t their most pressing issue. I want these characters to be your friend, first and foremost, before any talk of romance appears in the story. Sure, they might be attractive and you might like them, but do you really know them before you’ve bled with them? Before you’ve seen them at their worst? Before you’ve seen them break?
Sounds sadistic? Maybe. I like it when I see my characters both at their best, and their worst, and I want to share that with someone before I decide to kill them all off. >->
I love it when a game can give ROs their own orientation; it seems more realistic and inclusive than everyone being bi/pan/playersexual. Dorian in Dragon Age was so awesome because he was a gay romance, whose backstory didn’t change if you happened to be playing a female. His lesbian counterpart, Sera, wasn’t my cup of tea, but I adored that after turning her down, she moved on with her life and found a nice girlfriend; she could be gay without my interference.
I dislike it when the same character gender-flips in response to the MC’s sexual preference, or goes from explicitly gay to straight to accommodate them; it feels disrespectful for gender and preference to be treated as interchangeable, cosmetic qualities that fuel attraction, and also tends to create a less defined character. I tried to have one of my characters swap gender, based on an early tally of ROs, and they were the hardest character to write. The better solution I found to balance numbers was to have two distinct characters, male and female, and swap which one has more prominence (I believe Choice of Robots did this?)
“Distinct preferences for all ROs” isn’t always possible/the best solution, though. Balancing the romances available can be more complicated than “do gay/straight men and women all have multiple dating options.” In my WIP, for example, one of my ROs is aromantic; one is asexual. Some are geared towards monogamy, some towards polyamory. Two are non-binary, but for different reasons. That’s before you get into personality, body type, species, and other characteristics that could affect attraction.
With all of that going on - and the ability to date multiple characters, and see how the combination works out - it just got too staggeringly complicated to try to make anyone strictly gay.
I wonder if a romance character is a trans woman I should say Is a trans woman? I am thinking about doesn’t comment that until later in relationship. Or I should say right away. I mean I have her saying I am a woman and being their real gender not the one assigned as birth. She is more than the gender identity. So I don’t know if I should address her trans nature in game or not.
I am in the middle on this, I prefer their gender to be set for ease of writing and verisimilitude, but have them be mc-sexual (Kinsey was right!), unless there is a really compelling reason for them not to be.
Then again I really liked DA2’s approach with the main RO’s.
This might be a better question for the trans thread (in fact, I think there are some related answers there.) But judging by the Mass Effect Hainly controversy, and from asking this before, later is better. It’s something that would only be revealed to someone the character knows well and trusts.
The exceptions would be someone who is already “out” because of their job or something (e.g., a well-known trans activist/blogger), or a future setting where there’s no stigma about trans people or sharing intimate information with strangers. (“Hi, I’m a bisexual polyamorous cis female named Sashira with functioning reproductive capabilities, see this card for my fetish list. And you?”)
Some people are uncomfortable about learning someone’s trans status after getting physically involved with them. Many games I’ve seen with a trans RO have them bringing it up after getting close to the MC, but before sex (and possibly other physical intimacy) happens.
Some characters were already planned on having certain preferences, it’s just that some characters were barely fleshed out until I went through and actually figured out their purpose for the story. I briefly considered making some characters polygamous and others monogamous (and technically speaking I suppose one of them is polygamous), but I quickly found that I just couldn’t do it without throwing certain aspects of the character’s arcs out the window.
Oh well, I think at this point I just have to write it and stop fretting so much.
My personal taste is that if the game is only going to have a small selection of romance options, including ones where their gender is decidable, then going with player preference is fine. If you have a larger cast of RO’s though it’s likely better to define them more precisely as straight, gay or bi and work with that given it’s more realistic.
I’m currently mentally planning a story with either 8 or 10 characters who might be romanced, five guys and five girls (though some might not have an actual gender per say) in a somewhat similar vein to Monsters of Haven High (since you should be filling in for one of their characters), though it isn’t as much a romance game as that one could be. I’m thinking I would like to give each character specific ‘missions’ like the loyalty ones ME games have had for more social interaction regardless.
That’s a good idea about the loyalty missions, and one I’ve also planned to employ in my current wip. I really like the idea of having to actually get to know the character better before having a chance to actually romance them.
Yeah, even if you’re not intending on romancing a particular character or can’t do so it’s nice to unlock the chance to have a special adventure with them, and it gives the chance to open up new sides of their character. Whether you can already flirt with or romance the character before that or just afterwards rather depends on the character, I suppose.
The game I have in mind has an added aspect of your character not just replacing another like Haven but also have another character who is a ‘rival’, so that might affect whether you can romance or even befriend them since you would effectively start as enemies.
I was just thinking about the subject of what actually changes, when you change the gender of a character.
One aspect of this is cultural/societal: how gender affects socialization, how someone’s sexual attractions are viewed by others, and how their personality is interpreted into different roles or archetypes. This is why I think it’s so hard to make a realistic character switch genders without such a significant rewrite that you might as well create another character.
Another is linguistic: how you describe different characters who are otherwise identical in terms of character and history. There was a recent thread that got me thinking about how male vs. female gender swaps behave differently.
I have one character who has no fixed gender, but can appear as various genders. I’d be reluctant to compare them to a genderfluid human (they’re literally a bodiless shapeshifter) - the best suggestion for a term I’ve gotten is polygendered.
In different incarnations of identity, the major differences I’ve had crop up in writing them seems to be what they think they can get away with (in terms of breaking social rules) and techniques of flirtation. Poses in particular seem to change a lot in description - how they cross their legs, tilt their head, wink, joke around.
Which isn’t to say that a female character can’t have “masculine” gestures, or any be anywhere else on the spectrum; in the dating sim I’ve been working on with 5 female options, there’s a lot of variety there. But a cross-dressing or butch lesbian vs. a man are going to vary in description (whether cis or trans.)
What do you think… what exactly is it that changes when the same character swaps from one gender to another?
Hm, okay - addendum on that note: can anyone think of some characters that switched gender and did it well?
I remember Black Magic from Heroes Rise being in the guise of our favorite celebrity ™ and while people objected to being automatically attracted to him/her, the gender-switching was pretty well managed. I forgot that she wasn’t always female, to the point that I was confused when people mentioned her as their “boyfriend.”
And to bring up Bioware again, while not an RO, Commander Shepard seems to be mostly unchanged from male to female versions (except for certain ROs, and different voice actors) and be exactly the same badass in both. But we do have visual effects there to fill in for the physical differences.
The cool thing with Commander Shepard was that male/female had the same customization options apart from physical customization, and it never affected anything except possibly RO attraction.
Unlike Dragon Age, where as of the most primitive edition (Origins) they started off saying “genders are equal in this world and it shall affect very little”, and then there are frequent people saying “But how are there female Grey Wardens?” “Gee, you’re pretty for a warrior… does it offend thy lady to say this?” and the outright “I do not accept female fighters! I am an officer in a modern army, but I hold onto olden times prejudices, which I can rudely espouse without being demoted!” There were a lot of differences between the two possible genders that really were not warranted.
EDIT: I don’t want to talk about gender options in other classic games. It’s too depressing. Someone else can if they want to.
If Black Magic was more convincing as female and Bran more convincing as male - I await better examples.
I think gender swapping with RO’s and characters in general and if it works well varies on what sort of game you have. You have something more free form like Lucid’s Life of a Wizard/Mobster where the gender of the player, and in the case of Wizard nearly all the supporting cast, doesn’t affect things dramatically and is still a great game.
On the other hand you have something like Affairs of the Court where it is a game clearly written foremost with a female protag, and so the female versions of the romantic interests come across… oddly? I dunno.
I remember thinking about gender swapping with my theoritical WW2 French Resistance game about a character I thought I could let players choose the gender of and who was going to be a RO, only to decide that it would be a totally different character depending on if they choose a male character (a downed British pilot) or a female character (a SOE operative).
Sometimes changing the character completely seems to work best, or maybe partially, such as in Lost Heir where you can have a male or female friend who is either a fellow noble (and grows up to be a Cleric) or a servant (and grows up to be a Thief).
I don’t know how much influence David Gaider had on Shepard, he was the lead writer on the DA team.
The bigger problem with MEA is that the studio that developed the game didn’t have a lot of experience. From what I read, they worked on ME3MP and the Omega DLC, but not any full scale games before this one.
Black Magic, the companions from Lost Heir and E. Ecstasy from Slammed.
Both the companions from Lost Heir and E. Ecstasy have different scenes if they are a man or a woman.
All the others felt flat for me.
Edit: remembered other 2. Daisy/Dandy from Evertree Inn and Morgan from Magikiras.
Sid from “So, You’re possessed”. They are literally the only character that works so well both as male and as female character in my eyes. Most often I clearly like the characters better as one or the other.
Morgan from Magikiras too(Opposed to the other two: I liked Larry much better as male character and Samar, well, okay to be fair I didn’t thought them to be that interesting anyway, but I normally chose them to be female). However they didn’t have many scenes so they are more of a blank slate sometimes, not like Sid who has a very distinctive personality.
