I'm kind of curious as to what a female space marine would even bring to the game. Like, how would you play a Space Marine that is female differently from a male one?

Artemesia said:

Probably because we over sexualise women vs men, especially in gaming. Men can apparently be scarred and ugly and still be cool, but women 'must' be pretty or apparently they aren't worth playing.

A lot of the time they also have to wear revealling clothing, even when it's supposedly depicting the same 'level' of armour as the male equivalent. Warhammer (both of them) has been quite good in this regard, with women in armour generally not wearing high heels and bikinis. They still get the be-boobed armour, but at least it doesn't have cleavage.

This may be because gaming has traditionally been a male dominated field and so the 'purpose' of females in the game is different, a man playing a women isn't doing it (generally) for the same reason he plays a man.

On the other hand, given the argument that marines are effectively sexless then you could also argue that there would be no difference between playing a male or female marine, so why go to the trouble of creating female ones when a 'male' one will be for all intents and purposes identical and already exists?

GW has said their official stance on everything is 'maybe' (which I think is just a cop-out in the guise of a generous gesture) so even the argument 'no means no' still has 'maybe' in it (I just realised what that looks like... ).

For me, things need to make sense through logic for me to accept them (at least internal logic if the setting isn't reality). Hence my previous arguments as to why marines can only be female and the point that it isn't a universal LAW that they be female, but an in game, incharacter preference, just as the shape of a marine's helmet is not a law of gravity and could be changed at any time.

Hellebore

Yanma said:

I would think NO difference whatsoever. Other than the fact that the person roleplaying that character would be female.

Hellebore said:

Assuming in this case that they do/might/could exist, an in-setting fluff reason for taking female Marines instead of male ones would be having a larger recruiting pool to snag from. For example, a colony on a remote planet has an even spread of men and women(impossible unless it's a tightly controlled setting but for the sake of argument, it is so), two thousand of each. Now, again, for the sake of the argument, just assume every single male is a potential candidate. The Chapter(s) only have access to two thousand potential candidates.

But say the technology has been discovered or created to allow either gender to accept the gene-seed, even if the female acceptance rate is lower than the male's. Now the Marines have the ability to choose from four thousand potential candidates, increasing the number of successful recruits, and there was much rejoicing.

For in an game argument, it gives the player a choice as well as opening up some rather interesting roleplaying possibilities. Would people really take a female Astartes seriously? Perhaps one of the senior members of the group was around before the technology(in this case it being a relatively recent discovery by Imperium standards ie 50-100 years) is against the idea of women tainting the honor of good men and just considers her "playing at being a real Astartes."

I'm not as creative as many others who post here and my examples of roleplaying are not very good and I realize it, but I hope I made a little bit of sense.

Adunaphel said:

Well, that's not entirely fair. People don't have to roleplay characters of their gender. Which is why I'm wondering why people feel the need to force female space marines.

TS Luikart said:

Quite correct: Any adventure that a GM runs is technically non-canon by it's definition - as according to the official fluff it never happened - so it's not as if anyone actually adheres to canon anyway. Best just to chuck in what you feel works best when you run a game if you ask me.

macd21 said:

Fluff Alert!!!

Both Adeptus Astartes as an all-male organization and Adepta Sororitas as an all-female organization were first mentioned in Warhhammer 40 000: Rogue Trader (published 1987). However, the reasons why thing were the way they are were not fully explained untill years after. The two primary sources (of which pretty much everything else is derived from) are:

Adeptus Astartes (all male)

"Recruits must be fairly young, because implants often do not become fully functional if the recipient has reached a certain level of physical maturity. They must be male because the zygotes are keyed to male hormones and tissue types. Only a small percentage of people are compatible to receive the implants and hypno-suggestion to turn them into Marines." (White Dwarf 98, Origins of space Marines, published 1988)

Adepta Sororitas (all female)

"The Decree Passive was proclaimed by newly appointed Ecclesiarch Sebastian Thor. Under the literal interpretation of the decree however, the Adepta Sororitas were not obligated to disband because the decree made only explicit mention of "men under arms." Thor, recognizing the need for the Ecclesiarchy to have some kind of force and internal regulator, allowed them to remain, even if the spirit of the decree was rather blatantly disregarded." (Codex: Sisters of Battle, published 1997)

Now, back to the subject of the thread. Each GM is the god (or goddess) of his/her gameverse and nothing can force him/her to stick to fluff if s/he doesn't want to. However, for those who like to run/play as close to soft fluffyness as possible I'll say this:

I've run several games set in historical periods like 17th century colonial America, Medieval Europe etc. Some of these campaigns have been very militaristic in theme yet I've always gotten our female players (with their female characters) integrated into them without much trouble and I never had to make up things like "females can be knights" or somesuch.

I see no need for it here either. Yes, fluff says you cannot have Female Space Marines. Period. Fluff also says that at any given time when space marines travel somewhere they tend to have their own ships manned by thousands upon thousands of bondsmen crewing them. If you look it at this point of view, in reality what a company of deathwatch might include is:

100 Marines (100% male-looking-neuters)

2000+ Bondsmen (50% male and 50% female)

Hell, there is literally thousands of possible female characters available and not all of them are "normal human". Some of them will be experienced enough to fit in with battlebrothers.

Polaria said:

Also none of them would be on the same level physically as a Space Marine, which would probably mean staying back at base unless they wanted to get shot in the face and die, given the types of things Space Marines are sent up against.

MILLANDSON said:

Anyone not wearing full plate and carrying a halberd will be dead-man-walking in 15th century battlefield. Yet, this has never been a problem in any historical campaign I've run.

If you are running a lets-kill-them-all-and-let-Emprah-sort-em-out campaign where the main thing of the game is bang, bang and some more bang and you want a female character in it you can always introduce them to a female bondsman/IG walker pilot with her trusty Sentinel. Even the Space Marines would probably feel a bit small when compared to 1,5 tons of walking ceramite fitted with assault cannon.

Just a thought: are there any women on these forums who have a view on this topic? What do YOU make of a roleplaying game that allows you only to play male characters? Is this a problem for you, or an opportunity to get into the essence of roleplaying?

Well there is legion II and XI completely open to whoever wants to do what with marines, it just makes for a lot of backfilling and retro-active history writing for the GM. The GW canon articles tend to have the linear attention span of someone on ADD, back in the 1980's they where more like the Juicer out of RIFTS, loaded up with combat drugs, big armour, guns and a fairly large streak of psychosis.

At some point around 1989 someone decided, nah, it'll be unprofitable and politically incorrect to have Little Billy the 14 year old table top gamer have an army full of boy and girl randy crackheads, so the writing about the legions began and by the 90's we had some (often fairly camp) strickly blokey guys running around with cyberpunk-ish implants doing lots of roids instead.

Which is much healthier

Personally, I don't give a stuff. If someone writes up a girly-marine legion in enough detail, at least interestingly different not to be a cliche'd trope, (because there's already enough of them in WH40K) it'll be worthy to be used and I'll consider it as a GM, just as worthy as some hack writers copywrite stamped articles. The only reason I'm happy with the current background is that its convenient and there's a lot of it in detail, I don't let a corporation run my imagination on a linear basis, its bad enough I have to work for one day in and day out.

Yanma said:

You're right. It probably isn't fair. I am sure that their are good enough roleplayers out there to pull it off. I started with Dungeons and Dragons back in the late 70's and I have yet to see a player pull off a cross-gender character. Granted, I was out of the loop for quite a while until Dark Heresy pulled me back in.

I certainly don't mean to have any of my comments construed as sexist. I am not. In this case I just can't really see a male player really pushing hard to play a female Deathwatch Space Marine. It might not be a 0% chance, but it can't be too high.

I agree that the whole argument is somewhat silly. If a player wants to play a female Space Marine, big deal.

I agree 100% that the argument is silly. Game-wise, play a female Space Marine if you want to and if your GM allows it.

Personally, I like to stick to the fluff, not due to some sexist belief that SM's should only be male, but because I like the Sisters of Battle and how much butt they can kick without all the implants, hypno-indoctrination, chemical/genetic engineering.

Give them a flamer and a chainsword and some faith and watch the fireworks!

Also, there were two Primarchs whose gender was never revealed. GW stated that they left those two Legions open to players to create their own fluff. So there you go; a female Space Marine Legion of your own design.

Don't forget, a lot of the Dark Angels wear dresses over their armor. That surely has to tell us something...

(Torbal reaches for more popcorn (He's gone through a lot reading this very entertaining thread...))

Torbal said:

Know who else wore 'dresses' over their armor?

Spartans, Macedonians, Romans, Knights Templar/Hospitaller, and the Men-at-Arms of pretty much every Western/Eastern medieval nation.

SonofDorn said:

But what does that bring to the game?

Lightbringer said:

While I'm not female, one of my current players is and we've already talked about the potential pro's and con's of this game. The issue of sex never once entered into pro's or con's on her part. Her biggest reservation is the preconceived notion of trying to play a character with the all the personality of a damp dish-rag seconded by the probably heavy focus on combat over NPC interaction. Of course, for her, I didn't think the necessary male sex of the character would be an issue as she predominantly plays male characters.

I never noticed a problem or even thought there would be with cross-gender roleplaying. Heck, I never even knew such a thing was seen as a problem. In every group I've played in for the past 20 odd years, people just made the characters they wanted to play and played them, sometimes same sex, sometimes different. I've played female, male, androgynous, hermaphrodite, a female possessing a male, robot, dead, mineral, puppet, WTF, and a-sexual characters all and I feel i portrayed them all rather well. Really, when you get down to it, there's a hell of a lot more difference between a rock-monster and woman then there is a man and a woman. In the end, differences in sex are largely irrelevant to roleplaying because, in the end, male, female, a mix of both or neither, it's all just people. People are far more then their sex and their personalities and modes of reactions are formed by far more factors then biology alone. As such, there can be and is a wide verity of different combinations tat can arise. If there weren't, then all women would be effeminate and all men would be masculine when that is most definitly not the case.

This is roleplaying. Tat is to say, you play a role. Usually when we're starting out we play the role of Me as FillInBlank but eventually most roleplayers I've know graduate to explore and play other roles that are not them. Hell, just in standard games, we've all played stranger things, things more alien, things that no one on this planet have ever seen nor experienced. one would think tat would be harder to portray then the other half of a species we all live with and interact with on a daily basis.

However, I'd agree, tis whole issue is SILLY. Of course I'm of the mind that it's silly to be caught up on sex and gender, not so much about being reluctant to introduce female Space marines. Sure, you can, but why? The setting can be changed, but at what point to do you change it so much it's no longer the setting? And why bother playing in the 40k universe if your going to change it to something else? Wouldn't be easer to just play a different game?

Okay, re-read all the original Rogue Trader books, etc. and like it has been stated over and over... there are NO female space marines. The closest I found was 2 miniatures Female Warrior Jayne and Female Warrior Gabs which are both females in space marine power armour. ( http://www.solegends.com/citrt/rt601adventurers.htm )

I can't remember who, but someone posted the best answer... Who cares? Space Marines are asexual in all things other than appearance.

People have posted tons of good canon-following ideas, but in the end it is up to the GM.

-Cynr

Really? Five pages over a giant non-issue. That's sad.

Graver said:

H.B.M.C. said:

That's why the words "preconceived" and "probably" were used ;-) But yup, that would be anouther way of putting it.

I figured it not only answered Lightbringers question, but illustrated that, at least in one case, this was a non-issue as any concern of playing a Big Ol' Man Man was completely replaced by a simple misconception (all she knows of the background is what occurs in-game or what others tell her ;-) ) and a concern over it's probable focus (not knee-jerk as it's based on the core purpose of Space Marines much like our initial assumption of Rogue Trader is it would have a heavy focus on Space Travel). So, definitly in one female players case, it's focus and what she'll spend most of her game-time doing is far more important then the sex of her character which wasn't even a concern.

Hellebore said:

The "poster shot" of Adepta Sororitas which is used in many GW and FFG books (including IH chapter on Adepta Sororitas) features an Adepta in all-covering full power armor and regalia and with some pretty horrible scars on her face. Its also pretty much the best and coolest Adepta Sororitas picture I've seen to date. She looks like a woman, but she also looks like a tough and worn fighter.

But yeah, many times it seems the graphic designers just want to draw big melons and lots of bare flesh with little left to imagination.

Polaria said:

Arguably a better version here , for those who care.

Well, with Ascension coming out soon(hopefully) I don't see why you couldn't introduce a female Ordo Xenos Inquisitor leading the kill team operation, that's how it normally goes for the boys in black, Inquisitor leads on they shoot anything that moves.

At the same time I don't see what the big god **** deal is, "oh noez! Ican't play a chick!" you're a god **** sphess mahreen! suck it up, grab a bolter and purge some nazi- I mean Xenos ass!

H.B.M.C. said:

Oi.

While I agree, and, lets be honest, in a lot of cases a deathwatch RP is going to come down to violence. Lots of it. Still, assuming your GM isn't an 'everything by the book'-type, it is easy to include stuff like, say, an Ordo Xenos inquisitor in there? Perhaps even a former acolyte from a DH roleplay? A Rogue Trader who is 'doing his part'?