Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 08:00:53 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 18, 2022, 07:25:48 PM
But no, they chose to use "PRONOUNS", in a game set in the 1920s. A total anachronism. An intentional assault on the setting and a fuck you to its fans (who are notoriously meticulous about historical accuracy).

Replacing 'sex' with 'gender' may have been more era appropriate. I think many at the time tried to avoid the 's' word. Going to 'pronouns' instead is not just a virtue signal, but an attempt to force players towards being Woke.

A character sheet isn't a period document, though. They also didn't use "hit points" or "magic points" in the 1920s.

In-character, asking someone's "gender" would be just as much an anachronism as asking what someone's preferred pronouns are.  Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport. It was always assumed. An in-character document might have title like "Mr.", "Miss", or "Mrs." - but sometimes not.

But the character sheet is for players to read - not characters. People of that time did use gendered pronouns, and there were transgender people at the time who used pronouns different from their sex assigned at birth.

Jhkim: The most relevant of the 3 in game is "sex." Do you have broad hips or broad shoulders? 1920's NPCs are going to make snap judgments based on a first glance. Yes, not all women have broad hips but most everyone in the 20s is going to instantly know whether you're a man or a woman. Pronouns mean nothing unless there's a conversation and, of course, standard pronouns would be the norm in the 20s.

There could be several reasons to use different pronouns in game. A woman disguised as a man for instance. But that doesn't mean it needs to on the character sheet, while omitting the much more commonly used trait of the character's obvious biological sex.

Quote from: jhkim on October 18, 2022, 08:54:44 PM

Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 08:00:53 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 18, 2022, 07:25:48 PM
But no, they chose to use "PRONOUNS", in a game set in the 1920s. A total anachronism. An intentional assault on the setting and a fuck you to its fans (who are notoriously meticulous about historical accuracy).

Replacing 'sex' with 'gender' may have been more era appropriate. I think many at the time tried to avoid the 's' word. Going to 'pronouns' instead is not just a virtue signal, but an attempt to force players towards being Woke.

A character sheet isn't a period document, though. They also didn't use "hit points" or "magic points" in the 1920s.

In-character, asking someone's "gender" would be just as much an anachronism as asking what someone's preferred pronouns are.  Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport. It was always assumed. An in-character document might have title like "Mr.", "Miss", or "Mrs." - but sometimes not.

But the character sheet is for players to read - not characters. People of that time did use gendered pronouns, and there were transgender people at the time who used pronouns different from their sex assigned at birth.

It's still comes off as trying to poke people in the eye than for any altruistic reason. The term gender wasn't even in use until like the 60s, transsexual would be the correct terms. Really there was no good reason to change it from sex. Hell there's no reason to use it today.

As a (potentially career-ending) experiment. It could be interesting to see if a company came up with a couple of games within roughly the same genre (say sword & sorcery) and made one game as woke as possible, with some gender-fuzzy womxen who don't need no men on the cover or something, and the other game going all out non-PC with a cover something like this:


So one is publicized as woke and the other is very publicly not. Just to see which sells more. I think I know which wins but it's still good to show the numbers. Any takers? Chaosium?

Quote from: jhkim on October 18, 2022, 08:54:44 PM

Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 08:00:53 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on October 18, 2022, 07:25:48 PM
But no, they chose to use "PRONOUNS", in a game set in the 1920s. A total anachronism. An intentional assault on the setting and a fuck you to its fans (who are notoriously meticulous about historical accuracy).

Replacing 'sex' with 'gender' may have been more era appropriate. I think many at the time tried to avoid the 's' word. Going to 'pronouns' instead is not just a virtue signal, but an attempt to force players towards being Woke.

A character sheet isn't a period document, though. They also didn't use "hit points" or "magic points" in the 1920s.

In-character, asking someone's "gender" would be just as much an anachronism as asking what someone's preferred pronouns are.  Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport. It was always assumed. An in-character document might have title like "Mr.", "Miss", or "Mrs." - but sometimes not.

But the character sheet is for players to read - not characters. People of that time did use gendered pronouns, and there were transgender people at the time who used pronouns different from their sex assigned at birth.

People at the time could have asked a person's sex/gender as a form of insult, and commonly did so. "Are you a man or a woman?" If someone at the 1920s asked someone "What are your pronouns?" the initial reaction would almost certainly be confusion as to why would someone ask such a bizarre question.

The use of pronouns on the character sheet is not the equivalent of substituting gender for sex.

You are of course correct that the character sheet is for the players, but the pronouns could be determined by the sex/gender being indicated. If a player wanted to play the .01% of the people living a transgendered life at the time they could just explain it to the group rather than mangle a character sheet.

By going with pronouns Chaosium is trying to jam Wokeness on its customers. Also, by the thinking of transgender ideology using pronouns on the sheet says nothing about the sex/gender of the character. It doesn't even say anything about how they present themselves since by the ideology one could be a woman, look absolutely like a woman, but if you self-identify as a man and want to use male pronouns it's all good. One can't limit pronouns by adherence to gender orthodoxy in trans ideology. The pronoun entry on the character sheet says nothing more than self identification. For game play it's next to useless.

Quote from: Trond on October 18, 2022, 09:31:31 PM
As a (potentially career-ending) experiment. It could be interesting to see if a company came up with a couple of games within roughly the same genre (say sword & sorcery) and made one game as woke as possible, with some gender-fuzzy womxen who don't need no men on the cover or something, and the other game going all out non-PC with a cover something like this:


So one is publicized as woke and the other is very publicly not. Just to see which sells more. I think I know which wins but it's still good to show the numbers. Any takers? Chaosium?

I love this idea

Getting to the politics first:

Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 09:33:54 PM
By going with pronouns Chaosium is trying to jam Wokeness on its customers.

Yes, I'd say that the choice of "sex" or "pronoun" does have political implications - while having no effect on game play. And what you're doing is demanding that they bend a knee and conform to your preferred political choice.

If it were the opposite, and let's say that some people online were outraged about the label of "sex" on the character sheet. I think most posters here would say that they're getting outraged over nothing, and simply trying to demand that Chaosium conform.

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Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 09:33:54 PM

Quote from: jhkim on October 18, 2022, 08:54:44 PM
A character sheet isn't a period document, though. They also didn't use "hit points" or "magic points" in the 1920s.

In-character, asking someone's "gender" would be just as much an anachronism as asking what someone's preferred pronouns are.  Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport. It was always assumed. An in-character document might have title like "Mr.", "Miss", or "Mrs." - but sometimes not.

People at the time could have asked a person's sex/gender as a form of insult, and commonly did so. "Are you a man or a woman?" If someone at the 1920s asked someone "What are your pronouns?" the initial reaction would almost certainly be confusion as to why would someone ask such a bizarre question.

Yes, people of the time used terms like "man", "woman", "he", "she" and even "male" and "female" (if they were being scientific, say). And yes, someone might mockingly ask "Are you even a man?"

But the issue is the label used - not about what attitudes were. They would not ask a question like "What is your gender?" any more than they asked "What are your pronouns?" Both of those would be regarded with as confusing grammatical questions like "What part of speech are you?"

Quote from: wmarshal on October 18, 2022, 09:33:54 PM
You are of course correct that the character sheet is for the players, but the pronouns could be determined by the sex/gender being indicated. If a player wanted to play the .01% of the people living a transgendered life at the time they could just explain it to the group rather than mangle a character sheet.

The information is equivalent in both cases, and no more in-character either way. One can have "male/female" listed and infer whether to use "he" or "she", or have pronouns listed and infer male or female. Neither way gives a way to indicate whether the character is transgender. That's something for background description.

You're forgetting one thing though, it's a statement because it's changed, so yeah if they were outraged over it being called sex and not changing it I'd tell em to unknot their panties. If the term used had been pronoun since first edition and changed now then it would be a message. Though the pronoun people are buckets of crazy so I'd say they were choosing common sense.  There's no good way to look at this scenario

Chaosium should simply make the default setting the 2020s instead of the 1920s. Problem solved.

Quote from: jhkim on October 18, 2022, 08:54:44 PM
Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport.

To be fair, in the 1920s, married women were just a footnote in their husband's passports, at least in the US.  What was "assumed" was that married women didn't travel without their husbands.

See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/us-passport-history-women for a bit of interesting history of US Passports in the 1920s.

Quote from: Osman Gazi on October 19, 2022, 10:50:20 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 18, 2022, 08:54:44 PM
Even "sex" is fairly anachronistic in that it would rarely be used outside of a medical context. For example, there was no space to indicate sex on a period passport.

To be fair, in the 1920s, married women were just a footnote in their husband's passports, at least in the US.  What was "assumed" was that married women didn't travel without their husbands.

See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/us-passport-history-women for a bit of interesting history of US Passports in the 1920s.

Yup. Unmarried women could still have a passport, though. There just wasn't any space labelled "Sex" on it.

Modern people are used to seeing "Sex: M/F" on official documents, so some might imagine it was also true in the 1920s when it wasn't.

Quote from: jhkim on October 14, 2022, 01:57:13 AM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on October 14, 2022, 12:06:34 AM

Quote from: jhkim on October 13, 2022, 05:04:11 PM
From my view, I don't see that this would encourage anything in my gaming either way. I'd still run my 1920s game as the 1920s. Historically, there was no tradition of asking for pronouns, but there were still transgender people, as there have been throughout history. If someone had a transgender character, they'd put what pronouns they use in that space. If outed, they would be discriminated against by most of American society.

that doesn't make them the actual sex they identify as. you can tell when a man is a man just by looking at him. in the 1920s without HRT this gets worse- any transgender character would be outed extremely quickly. If they are a woman, she can pass a little easier- although the curve of her shoulders and the width of her hips would be a dead giveaway.

This is shown false by history, though. Lucy Hicks Anderson lived for decades as a woman, and was only outed when required to undergo medical examination. Lili Elbe also lived for years as a woman, often introduced as her wife's sister-in-law.

As conjecture, historical European clothing was far less form-fitting than modern fashions. Also, with historical medicine and disease, people more often had irregular features from ill health or developmental issues. Those are only conjectures, though. However they did it, there were transgender people who were not noticed for years - and probably some more who were never outed.

Even trans people who 'pass' look uncanny and/or ugly. Lucy Hicks Anderson looks like an ugly masculine woman. Lilli Elbe looks like a caveman. So on and so forth, I bet people subconsciously detected their real sexes but couldn't put their conscious finger on it.

Also even if they did pass- they are still their birth sex no matter what. Nothing will change this. Ever.

And this is why when I'm making my character sheets, I just leave a blank for character demographics and let the player sort out if they want to put their character's doctorate, family tree, or a made up pronoun.

  Perhaps a new pronoun "clinically insane" is better?   If I go to the doctor and request I have my left hand removed, he is going to lock my ass up.  I see no real reason to consider genital removal any different, and demanding I conform to pronoun usage is simply attempting to get me to go a long with insanity.  Hard pass.  If game companies want to get into this sort of game, so be it.  Lost customers/gain them, but I am out.

Quote from: Ocule on October 17, 2022, 10:50:51 AM

Quote from: Fheredin on October 16, 2022, 06:01:06 PM
I do not (yet).

I do have a project I hope to publish soon titled Selection: Roleplay Evolved, which is an apocalyptic biohorror strategy game. I don't post much about it here because this is a 90%+ OSR community and Selection is...decidedly not OSR. To give you an idea how very much NOT OSR this game is, let me outline its namesake mechanic.

QuoteYou capture monster DNA by killing them in combat, and then you can choose between archiving the DNA for later use, grafting it onto your character, or you can Select Against it by giving it to a special character called the Arsill, who will burn it to create a jamming signal, thus blocking the antagonist from designing or using monsters with that specific ability for one session.

There are several purposes for this mechanic. It lets you skip the leveling up Skinner box by taking on a difficult encounter in the first session, giving you late-game abilities which you can start using at the beginning of Session 2. But the real thing it's supposed to do is create a dialogue where players internalize how the monsters work and they talk to each other about which monster abilities they want for their characters and which monster abilities they think are too dangerous. Like I said; strategy game.

I'm much more active over on Reddit's RPGDesign. For instance, here's where I first revealed some of the artwork.https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/gnkjsr/selections_first_batch_of_artworks/

However, around the time of that reveal there was some civil unrest in that sub (I was one of its mods at the time; I think this was a deliberate attack) and I've basically stopped posting new content on Reddit. Commenting questions from other users? Yes. But I think I may have been painting a target on my back by making my own posts because a game this far out of the norm is clearly more dangerous to established games than one of the dozens of heartbreakers which litter the sub.

I've put the project on ice, in part because creating monsters in the system is still a pain, so there are problems to iron out. But mostly, I'm waiting for a moment when whoever attacked the subreddit can't possibly respond. If I'm wrong and no one attacked the sub, then all I'm going to do is waste a little time. But if I'm right (and I'm pretty sure I am), then launching when they can respond will just end in me getting sabotaged and cancelled.

This actually sounds great, reminds me Rippers for savage worlds but with more emphasis on grafting monster parts. Ran a year long campaign using rippers and my main complaint was the "ripping" mechanics didn't quite feel right. More of cyberware than the body horror I was aiming for

I thought Rippers as well while reading that.
The other problem in that game was that Rippertech was so punishing that none of the players I played with even wanted to attempt it.