So I'm perhaps GMing at a LGBT convention (Queervention yeah!) and the organizers have asked the games be relevant to LGBT thematics. It's not an obligation but would be better.
I'm currently hesitating between Promethean, Changeling and Mage. Thoughts?
This ain't really my thread or my topic, but I figured I'd pipe in here to say this: Don't try to do the X-Men as a con one-shot. If your audience is LGBT-and-associated folks, they already understand forces like bigotry and otherness, they don't need the game system to reinforce that via crude metaphors for what they've already experienced. You don't need to remind them that they are hated, abused and how prejudice exists, all simply to have a fun-time game. Even, perhaps especially, if you are distancing that by proxy of magical-trappings.
Like, its real easy to say "okay so these two narratives obviously have parallels, lets just connect those parallels," but as has been already mentioned, that's a pretty tough line to tow without getting presumptive. I don't know where you stand particularly (enough to be invited to/visit a LGBT convention, anyhow!) but someone Cis using the presentation of Trans thematics is already going to
be interpreted as those thematics
being as-delivered by a Cis person, and the same for each variation down the line. You gotta be prepared for that, and how much you, the GM, will be showing as what your impression of "LGBT thematics" actually
are. Much like how some folks might find illuminating idealizations of the True Self/fighting bigotry like superheroes to be a cathartic exercise, others might look at it as "I don't want to sit here on vacation and explore my inner dark thoughts about dysphoria with strangers/have someone I barely know pretend to be a bigot at me so I can pretend punch the faces saying those things. I get enough of this shit as-is."
If your way to uphold LGBT thematics is to make it about The Fight, you gotta be aware that most of the people attending the game will be coming out of The Fight to play in it, and return right back to The Fight once the con ends. WoD is a bleak, oppressive place, but you shouldn't feel inclined to make interacting with it feel moreso oppressive for people already living in bleak, marginalized status themselves by creating unnecessary equivalences. So that said, instead of picking your splat based on "whose metaphor is best for widespread discrimination by a world which hates and fears them," you should instead look at what splat
shares the current LGBT focuses of reaching out and establishing communities with others like yourself, rediscovering lost/buried history because these issues are not
new or
recent, standing with unlikely allies to hold onto the places where you can freely Be who you Are, and so on.
Like, imagine a late-1960s Promethean game set in Manhattan, surrounding a throng of 'homeless youths' who have been graciously permitted to live out of the back of a low-key gay bar as liqour-runners against unexpected police raids. The crew is playing their parts in the bustling nightlife of Greenwich Village only to find themselves suddenly embroiled in the turbulent Stonewall Riots. Do they stand with and protect their newfound friends and benefactors against the unjust cops, in a modern echo of the Golem of Prague, or do they risk inciting the mobs and police they've associated with via growing Disquiet to further and more outlandish gestures of violence, possibly causing as much harm to the growing movement as themselves? Do they pull up stakes and simply leave the neighborhood to the baying wolves, putting that personal growth behind them as well?
In this sense, it doesn't really Matter how the characters or their mechanics can be coded
as LGBT for the use of creating personal conflict (though several of them legit being so, that's par for the course), because the characters are already operating within the contentious history where
being LGBT and the formative rise of civil rights is a conflict unto itself. Its about living
in it, as the presence of a monster, not living
as the monstrous version of what they already know.
