Hi, all!
So, a lot of people would rather avoid roleplaying in settings featuring heavy bigotry, and I think that's totally fair--a lot of people play D&D/Pathfinder/Crab Truckers to relax and have fun, and reliving real, lived bad experiences can be stressful. Or, if they're not queer, it can still be stressful to try to recreate stories they haven't actually experienced, knowing they're going to mess up.
I very rarely play in games with, say, transphobia, because most people I game with don't find that very fun. Personally, though, I think it can be really interesting to try to explore that with a fantastical lens. No shade to those who don't like it; I personally do, as long as it's on my own terms. I find it personally empowering to play a trans woman berserker who ran away from transphobic parents and became an adventurer, or an ace lesbian who fled an arranged marriage to a man. I find those sorts of stories more relatable than what feels for me personally like (and this will sound sassier than I mean it) fantastical wish fulfillment.
I'd like to hear other people's experiences--both negative (times you attempted it poorly, or got trapped in a bad gaming group where they insisted on roleplaying it out) and positive!
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Also, just to stress, I have no issue with Golarion choosing Not To Go There. Golarion is a big tent setting and needs to be accessible. I'm fine adding stuff in, when appropriate to the group. Let's not make this yet another "Golarion slavery" thread.
One personal example: The "runaway trans woman" is a trope I use a lot in character design, because a lot of my loved ones have that kind of experience and it feels very grounded to me in, like, the sort of backstory adventurers would have. Adventuring is inherently queer--it's the job of outcasts, loners, lonely souls looking for companions, people who couldn't cut it or didn't want to in the traditional class system. They aren't peasants, they aren't lords. Peasants and lords alike may look up to them, dread their arrival, or look to them for help--or all three at the same time. They're their own thing.
I personally think in a world with adventurers, most adventures are probably going to be queer and/or disabled, because where else are you going to go? If you and your girlfriend fall in love but can't afford to move out of your bigoted family's home, the two of you take to the road and go looting undead-filled cairns and helping farmers' daughters with rat problems.
A current PC I'm working on is an ex-Neutral Evil cleric who killed her abusive parents and became a bandit. She's inspired by stories I've been told by loved ones who themselves at times have thought horrible things about their parents, or even viewed it as a potential survival necessity. She's a very complicated character, and to me, the fact that her parents were transphobic is intrinsic to her character--even if I've never said so to the GM.
I personally think in a world with adventurers, most adventures are probably going to be queer and/or disabled, because where else are you going to go? If you and your girlfriend fall in love but can't afford to move out of your bigoted family's home, the two of you take to the road and go looting undead-filled cairns and helping farmers' daughters with rat problems.
My female dragon-blooded sorceress took up the call while the rest of the party was busy.
It wasn't a 'rat problem'.
Three months later, the influential person tried to get my sorceress thrown in jail, because apparently the gods have a sense of humor and/or felt that my character's hookup was helpful for something. Turned out that the person she'd 'dealt with the rat problem for ' was pregnant.
Somehow.
There was a lot of story there, and it ultimately influenced my character away from her downward descent towards Evil back towards Neutrality and then Good.
During an infiltration of a very racist bigoted city-state we came across a beggar that carried themselves with an air of superiority -- not bigoted, though.
Turned out that he'd been a leading general for the city-state but had lost most of a leg during a battle. Rather than try to get him a good prosthetic, the bigoted folks in the city kicked him literally to the curb.
We recruited him in about five minutes with a hot meal, ale, and a promise of having a chance to get some payback in.
Thus was born our Crippled Army, and we recruited mainly from folks we accidentally maimed during battle, and when they found out who our General was they went from 'oh, this is some sort of joke, right?' to the most fanatical faithful crew of psychos I've ever seen in an NPC army.
The fact we were paying them better than they were getting paid in the army that had kicked out the General (and would have kicked them out due to their injuries) didn't hurt, either.
My brother used to play a Dwarf whose "day job" was being a low-level bureaucrat and city inspector. He was actually a flamboyantly gay Assassin. He roleplayed him to the hilt and we had a lot of great games with that character.
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I have historically preferred the more indie and small-shop ttrpgs and exploring horrifying situations is core to a number of them. As with anything, the important part is to make sure that everyone at the table actually wants the same thing.
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Example: Monsterhearts is explicitly about queer identity and coming of age. It is really hard to have a serious exploration of those topics without also exploring queerphobia. The book doesn't mechanize queerphobia or even dedicate a serious word count to it. It just assumes that the people playing it likely have at least a passing grasp of queer issues and includes some context for those that don't.
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Example: Monsterhearts is explicitly about queer identity and coming of age. It is really hard to have a serious exploration of those topics without also exploring queerphobia. The book doesn't mechanize queerphobia or even dedicate a serious word count to it. It just assumes that the people playing it likely have at least a passing grasp of queer issues and includes some context for those that don't.
Avery’s later work, Dream Askew, is about a queer community in the post-apocalypse, and I think also does this incredibly well. You’re given a lot of control to dial each of its potential themes up and down to the table’s taste, queerphobia included.
It also has an incredibly light gender mechanic that I think is inspired - every playbook has a list of genders you pick from, and only the Arrival, a clueless outsider, has “man” and “woman” in their list. The rest are a mix of queer terms and evocative words, but none are defined, leaving players to figure out what it means to them.
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My 'Go-To' when I want the Players (not just a Player roleplaying their PC) is to make an NPC particularly horrible: I've never made an NPC -- or townspeople -- homophobic or anti-transgender, but I've made grossly racist and sexist and podophilic, etc. NPCs and townspeople. When you need the Players to really Hate an NPC and don't want to just bully the PCs character sheets, I've found striking a chord with the NPC is a good way to do it.
The default assumption in my setting is that most forms of prejudice, from racism to sexism to homophobia, are not present at all and that, if I want an NPC or townspeople or societal norm to have a prejudice -- such as the racism in Ilsurian against native Varisians -- then I have to spell it out specifically.
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Yeah, that is an interesting question on how to approach. I think foisting it on players can have big problems, but if a group is comfortable exploring that, there can be real catharsis to be had.
And I have not really explored it as a character background element, with the exception of a trans man hobgoblin, but that was still pretty mild and not the driving force.
Sometimes, it's fun to fight crappy people. Facing forces you can't change can be demoralizing when they reflect real experience, though.