Third print supplement - actually

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Ha! Jason thinks he's kidding.

In my notes are ...

"Sorcerer and the Single Girl"
"Sex and the Single Sorcerer"
"Our Sorcery, Ourselves"
"Sex, Sorcery, and You"

I was getting kind of giddy by then.

Best,
Ron

Am I reading it correctly that a decent portion of this book will cover relationships? Well, since two of the bigger relationship tags are either being related to someone or who you've slept with I would probably call this book "Blood & Sex"

Or is that too over the top?

[Ian Charvill]

Ron's construction specifically excludes cases like that.

I'm not so sure - you may be treating male and female players equally by discriminating against them both in different ways but the basic premise of denying a person access to certain things because of their sex just bothered me on a basic level but then I thought of something.

In my fathers example, the reverse rule (male player -> close father, female player -> distant father) would be just as valid, but would lead to different characters and different thematic content.  I think that's interesting; I can see setting up a game to intentionally explore those issues.

The thing that struck me that one of the things about Sorceror is that it is about transgression.  Therefore I don't see Ron adding rules that reinforce gender roles but rather rules than break them.

The parallel with your Ars Magica thing would be in saying "OK, in this saga all the women had close ties to their father, while the men all had distant fathers, in the next saga the women have to have distant fathers and the men have to have close fathers.

I.e. using rules to force people to tackle unconscious gender stereotyping.

E.G. D&D - men can't play half-orcs or dwarves; women can't play clerics or mages (or something, I don't speak D&D that fluently).

Ian

[lumpley]

Hey Ian.

I think the reason it doesn't bother me is I'm not saying anything about men or women in the real world, really.  I'm not saying that all and only women have close relationships with their fathers, or that women want close fathers and men don't, or anything like that.  All I'm saying, I guess, is that I'm interested in (real) womens' experiences of close fathers, and that seems a perfectly legitimate setup for a game.

(Interesting: the gender of the character doesn't matter a bit.  If Emily plays a man with a close father or a woman with a close father, either way I'm getting a woman's take on close fathers.)

It should be consensual, not GM-imposed, of course.  "Hey, let's play a game where y'all's characters have close fathers and mine has a distant father, sound fun?" not "You get 30 points for Attributes but you and you can't spend any on Distant Father, for so it is written."

I just thought of a comparison.  I read Francesca Lia Block and John Crowley, whose books seem (casually, off the top of my head, but maybe it's just Color confusing me) thematically related.  Their takes are very different, at least partly because of their genders, and both are interesting but I wouldn't want them writing each others' books.  By which I mean, the gender of the author of a book sometimes matters; why not the genders of the players?

-Vincent