I most often play Pathfinder, with a mostly-canon Golarion setting. I almost always play a woman - sometimes I make her trans, and sometimes I don’t. Her trans status is usually based on the rest of their characteristics, and whether I feel it “makes sense” for my character to realize she’s trans.
When I played a brash, independent sorceror, or a young noblewoman with resources and connections and a supportive family, it made sense to make my characters trans because they were in a position to figure that out and had the ability to do something about it. In my current Pathfinder game, my character was raised in a militaristic cult that isn’t a good environment for deep introspection, so I made her cis.
When I made my character for Baldur’s Gate 3, she was a self-insert alongside my BF’s self-insert, so she was transfemme and it was an easy decision. I’ll generally prefer to make trans characters, but only if I can make up a good justification to do so.
I recently spoke to a friend who primarily makes cis woman characters as part of the whole “power fantasy” that comes with roleplaying, and her experience was a little different than mine, so I thought I’d ask here. Trans Hexbears, are your RPG characters trans?
mostly all cis women until more recently when games started offering transfemme options
if there’s any game mechanical option to make them trans i absolutely will. even if it’s just a DIY background text block
I generally prefer playing trans characters if the setting makes transition accessible enough for them, and i particularly like it when the details of transitioning work slightly different and lead to a different lived experience i can explore while still playing a transfem character. When that isn’t an option and i would realistically have to play a character that just gets stuck in a shitty pre transition dysphoria death loop forever, i prefer to go with cis women who work as trans allegories instead. Most of these cis characters are from early on in my transition, in a few cases before i was out to anybody, and the oldest ones are very eggy, but i still love them dearly. It’s fun to take a character i originally made to try out feminine gender roles in my questioning phase and play her now that i actually know what kind of woman i am, it’s a nice contrast to see how she has developed and how different i act when roleplaying her now.
With my next character, i’m going with “normal contemporary trans goth GF” except that she has her own transbian kinkster blood cult because she happens to be a Tremere witch in a game of V:tM. I just wanna lean fully into the queervillain and Anarch thing (we’re playing V5, so eating the city’s Prince and taking everything over is a fairly realistic option when we play hard). Really looking forward to that, witches are always fun for me, it’s such a nice archetype when you’re going for “unapologetically queer power fantasy”.
i recently started doing an rpg for the first time ever and im playing a very large bulky masc man despite being a waifish girltwink in reality
all my characters are canonically trans
No. Almost always make them cisfemale. I will go offscript though and make them male if it fits the personality of the character I’m aiming for. Like I’m about to put together a Barbarian/Warlock for a game my partner is running and I’m thinking male Tiefling for it for story reasons. Only downside to my rampant voice training is that my male voice sounds fake af now and it’ll be super hard to roleplay it.
To bring this all around though, I’m waiting for the perfect idea before I make a character trans. I just can’t quite get to a character where it would make a very interesting story where it didn’t feel pointlessly inserted just because. I’m certainly going to try. If there’s one thing I love doing with TTRPGs, it’s that I love creating story-driven characters that the DM can work a lot with.
i honestly didnt realize until you made this post but I every character across many genre of ttrpg I make cis-women that are strong in combat, capable outside and containing an obvious vulnerability that is explored in game.
I decide plenty of my female characters are trans but it never comes up. When I was cracking by baby trans egg, I played a changeling who spent most of her life passing as a human man and then basically just decides she’d rather pass as a human woman.
last time i made a character she was based on a headcanon i saw about sorawo from otherside picnic, which is that she has this deeply traumatic backstory, raised by a cult, managed to get out, and at some point in there she transitioned through some magic bullshit. she doesn’t remember it, and her memory is bad enough she just kind of assumes her memories of being a boy are her misremembering things
i tend to either play as cis women or trans men (im afab bi gender), but i play trans men waaay more often than cis women (and basically all the times in games since i came to terms with gender). i personally don’t identify with wanting an amab body, so that’s probably why. if you want to completely medically transition or wish you were born the opposite of sex it would make sense to be part of the power fantasy? though i also don’t really like playing power fantasies i usually make my characters pretty awful people.
though ig at the moment im playing a cis man and a ??? i have no idea ig they’re omnigender, but that’s the trend for me :p
No. Almost always when I make a character it’s either some type I’m trying to explore(playing as a coward is always fun) or I make an idealised version of myself that I could’ve been without male puberty and the assorted mental issues that followed that.
I mostly make my characters cis women but their backstory will usually have some kind of trans allegory in it. I feel like it’s a safer way to interact with my feelings about being trans without necessarily having to explicitly deal with the types of things that can be overwhelming / traumatic IRL.
My current character is cis but has a “deadname” from before she joined her monastic order. It’s allowed me to play with this idea, but ngl it still hurt a little when my character got deadnamed in-game.
Ironically my trans characters don’t usually have to deal with any trauma about it, and it usually comes out as jokes about peeing standing up.
Feels sort of weird to me to be straight up trans in a dnd like setting, but i’ve done it once. Mostly i just try a bunch of different gender expressions for fun (and potentially testing purposes ^^).
I’ve really played across the whole spectrum now. I think my favorite character was an agender asexual bard (that was honestly a lot of fun)!
