Thursday, February 14, 2013

Role-Playing in Historical Settings

Recently our Friday night gaming group has started a new game designed and created by one of our very talented GMs.  The setting is roughly the Bronze Age in the Endo-Asia world, and we are using the 3.5 rules and core classes with a couple of exceptions.  So far the game is fantastic and was really a pleasure playing, not only because it a new and exciting setting, but also because the way the GM has set up the zones there is actually the threat of death with every encounter.  It is truly a brave new world that we are exploring and the process is fun because it is partly based off plausible-historical events but with the familiarity of the 3.5 system.
Role-playing in an alternate historical setting can be tricky, and there are always questions as how much the GM wants to stick to historical probability and where the suspension of disbelief comes into play. Being that I am the only female in the gaming group (with not many cross-gender characters from the other players or myself) this begs the question of gender roles in gaming in historical-based settings. Our GM was very quick to establish that our setting is egalitarian in nature so characters were treated similarly no matter what gender the character chose to play, but this is a factor when trying to create a setting based in the past. While there are many examples of exemptions in history, the general population of both men and women were largely defined by their roles in society, and if one is strictly adhering to a historical setting, both genders are going to be largely ruled by the normality of the time.  Living in a world that has come so far in social rights, this can be a bitter tonic to swallow, as so much of me wants to fight every sort of gender inequality I come across.  At what point does one discard past roles and start tweaking with social structures in a historical setting in order to make players feel more at home? It is a question that I know I am glad we do not usually struggle with in our personal gaming group, as we usually do not play historical-based games, but this encounter triggered this thought process about the conflict that is bound to emerge from such a situation. I do not have a solution at this point, but I am just glad our group plays systems where this is largely not an issue, but if we do ever play a setting that attempts to immerse the players in a historical place and time, this will be an obstacle both my character and I will have to face.