rpg

When I ran games in high school most of my NPCs were male because my horny friends would always try and hook up with the women.

Now I do not mention gender unless it is relevant. I do need to add some non-cis, non-binary npcs.

Finally, a use for my d17!

@juergen_hubert
Actually, I have.

That chart is mixing gender and sexual orientation, by the way. May look fun at first glance, but less so if you look at it a little linger IMO. 😉

My thoughts is make the characters first there backstory and everything then roll for gender, as if I did gender first I would feel like I draw more towards stereotype of that gender. As one gender does not define who someone is. And this way they all seem more diverse and more alive that way.

I did this in a novel I wrote, actually. I assigned TLA 'names' based on their job (ENG, PIL, etc), and any time a gender would normally be referenced in the text I used XXX - both for easy searching. I got about 70% of the way through when my beta readers rebelled - they absolutely HAD TO KNOW what gender everybody was. Sigh.

But by this time the characters' personalities and speech patterns were well established, so I flipped a coin for each one, and continued onward. I'll probably do this again some day and just ignore the beta readers.

I am no fan of random generation, but I try to have a proper gender balance, and found that gender swapping cliché is a good way to re-use them, the stupid prince worried about his hair, the lady knight

I'm genderfluid, I write whoever I wanna.

I have a random NPC generator tables I made. I have a 1d8 for gender (1 is androgynous female and 8 is androgynous Male, the rest are male and female). I tend to have certain races more androgynous and gender bending than others. I also have height, clothes, hair, eyes and body. Similar tables with some personality traits.

For race I have a 1d100 table for my major regions. The 1d100 let's me get small percentages of rarer species and allows me to create groups. So for the current area 70% are from the region with 60% being the top three races and the remaining 10% being atypical. The remaining 30% are broken down by nearby regions and foreigners. This lets me customize each section and roll on subsections of the table if I have to.

I always race, mostly roll gender and everything else is optional. The gender, appearance, and personality tables are universal and I have made few race tables for the campaign. They are useful tools to have created and to use

That's usually my go to starting point into making an OC. I just spin the weel on a bunch of arbitrary trait and mold the character based on how they would be in the world.