Character Demographics

I have a somewhat complicated opinion on non-cis-white-male-etc. characters in gaming and fiction. That opinion could be summarized in a few key phrases: “I prefer diversity”, “I sometimes feel uncomfortable or unworthy of writing that diversity myself”, “diversity is not a numeric quota I am obliged to meet”, “attacking me on this topic will cause me to ignore you”, and “constructive criticism is never an attack”.

With all that said, I took all the Modern Generation characters we have on the wiki, collected their identity indicators into a spreadsheet here (link allows comment - more on that in a second), and graphed a few of these metrics. The results are pretty unsurprising (e.g. women outnumber men 2:1 or so).

Please take a look at the spreadsheet. If you (as GM, or player of a PC, or primary writer for an NPC) know better than me, leave a comment on the spreadsheet or here, and I’ll update the data. There’s a lot of “unknown”/“unspecified”, even among some NPCs I’ve been writing for, and sometimes that’s okay too.

author: Bill G.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6603732

Coolness.

My feelings on diversity in my writing (including my player characters) parallel yours (including the question of being “qualified” to write about Chinese woman, or about aspects of Chinese mythology in general, but, then, also being a believer in certain universals of human experience that anyone can write). It does make me want to explore some other variations in characters I run in the future.

author: *** Dave H.
url: https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/6605679