(05-03-2014, 04:40 PM)TheLastCandle Wrote: This is a touchy subject among most communities I've roleplayed in. There are cases to be made on both sides: I have had strictly IC interactions with female players who have stated in similar threads on other games' forums that they simply wouldn't be comfortable RPing a relationship with a character played by another woman. Some were single, some were happily married. The vast majority of those interactions never bled into real life and were relatively drama free, so I feel it's unfair to generalize and say that these players simply don't know the difference between IC and OOC.
With that being said, if an opportunity presents itself to go into a romantic subplot in my RP, what matters to me is the way the character is played. If someone I know for a fact is male (through OOC threads here on the RPC, or via VOIP during raids and such) can still play a female character in a believable way, with a personality that my character would be attracted to - then sure, why not?
More often than not, though, I find female players are simply better at playing female characters - so in that way I supposed there does exist a bias on my part. I have been pleasantly surprised in the past, though, and one of my oldest characters (a dark elf sorcerer in a text-based game called GemStone IV) remains dysfunctionally but happily married to a wonderful half-elf wizardess who is played by a RL male. xD
You know, I have honestly never run into a player like the ones you specified in your first paragraph. So, fair enough! That'll teach me for making blanket assumptions about people based on my own limited experience, eh?
Hee, as for your last paragraph I think an argument can be made that both men and women sometimes don't play opposite gender very well (hell, sometimes I cringe and wonder if I'm doing an okay job). Though, there was once a guy the whole (small-ish) community I was on thought was a woman for a whole year and a half because he played his female character just so freakin' well. When he finally corrected someone in a plot post for calling him 'she', there was an explosion of disbelief. We look back at it and laugh now, but man, he got so much respect from all of us after that! And apologies. Lots of apologies.
Like you said, it really just boils down to the way the character is played/portrayed, eh?
