Random thought – does the "infiltrate a gentlemen’s club" card have a higher difficulty level if your character identifies as female? That seems like an obvious type of adventure to have slightly different descriptions depending on your character’s gender, and I was intrigued that it didn’t seem to. [li]
This is Fallen London. A lady can be a gentleman if she wants to.
I think nothing in FL depends on character sex (anyone want to confirm or deny?). Because FL is a liberal and permissive society. Oh no, wait it’s not. grin But (I’m guessing) because it would be extremely difficult to balance things such that it wasn’t really annoying were male/female/not telling characters treated differently. It’s bad enough that it happens in real life.
While I see your point, perhaps it would be tending too much towards realism without being particularly narratively interesting? If it’s a compromise, I think it’s an easy one to see which way is the ‘right’ way to go. And maybe I just have a boyish figure and am easily disguised. Dresses etc. aren’t character sex limited.
If you want to weave in-game lore around it - perhaps it’s telling that while the Bazaar needs love stories, it doesn’t really seem matter whom (who? gah. Words.) they’re between. Perhaps it cares more for quality of person involved rather than type of person, and this attitude has trickled down to society where (see above, xKiv’s post) ‘gentleman’ is more status based than sex based? There are better and more educated lore weavers than me. This could be a topic they could chew?
edited by babelfishwars on 4/18/2014
Oh, I very much like that it almost never does matter what your character’s gender is. That task just seemed a little more inherently gendered than usual, and I’d been expecting the story to be that Weft was infiltrating as a servant or something, rather than an actual gentleman, which some characters would have an easier time diguising themselves as than others.
My assumption was something like babelfishwars’ - that while some Londoners are trying to preserve their London habits, including maintaining strict sex divisions*, the Bazaar hungers for stories - the more diverse and recherché the better - and that means eroding the limited social forms of the cities it hosts, with the goal of throwing as many people of all backgrounds as possible into each others’ company, and feasting on the results.
[quote=SarahTheEntwife]Random thought – does the "infiltrate a gentlemen’s club" card have a higher difficulty level if your character identifies as female? That seems like an obvious type of adventure to have slightly different descriptions depending on your character’s gender, and I was intrigued that it didn’t seem to.
[/quote][li]
When you’re living in a city alongside devils, squid-things and whatever the Masters are, you tend to gain a wonderful sense of perspective. There are probably still a few Londoners with a less-than-accepting outlook on life, but after three decades or thereabouts of Neathiness, one would expect those boundaries to have softened considerably.
That’s how I’ve been explaining it, anyway.
I’m a lady, but I’ve got a ratskin suit and a sneak-thief’s mask–I’m pretty certain I can infiltrate anything.
The only thing remotely gender-related that impact story mechanics is on the way to POSI, where one of the routes is to have either a gentleman-ish or lady-ish wardrobe to advance.
http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/A_matter_of_the_wardrobe[li]
But you can have both :)
edited by Lumyire on 4/23/2014
Personally, I think it is odd that the guys at Failbetter didn’t provide any Feminine Affiliations for us guys to join… I mean, to give the ladies the option of course.
[li]
You get a choice between joining the gentlemen for cigars / ladies for gossip at the society dinner thing.
What would be a parallel to a gentlemen’s club? A suffrage movement? Hmm. My knowledge of relevant real world history is nil. :-(
Man, what nineteenth-century social organisations -weren’t- run by women? …okay, a lot of the ones that considered themselves the most important, but still. Charities, church affairs, political campaigning, economic organisation, academia, science, salons, secret occult societies… you don’t have to look far to find women making things happen. Most of the explicitly feminine ones I can think of - ones that are still active today - are early-20th century rather than late-19th, but they had many predecessors. God’s Editors is probably a good example, actually - revising Biblical literature seems to attract the ladylike scholars of the Neath.
Interesting. It’s weird how little I know about certain periods of history (my vague awareness of things comes from unreliable films/fiction). I vaguely recall studying the field rotation system, and then history leaped ‘a little’ forward to WW2. School left me with gaps.
[li]
Also, we don’t know much about Fallen London’s legislative branch, but there’s at least one female parliamentarian in whatever remains of the House of Commons, so women can stand for government - that doesn’t necessarily mean they can vote, I admit, and I do recall the evidence being unclear on that point in other cards.