Hence our perennial quest-giver NPC Jod being agender, though somehow no one noticed that until like their third adventure :0Since this topic is available again I just wanna say this is an absolutely top-notch suggestion and definitely something I recommend.
Thank you.
I actually don't remember being told up until later and then I thought you had changed them to being agender. But yeah, that unfortunate given that not long after I introduced an agender character myself.
That's because it's normal to unconsciously do that. Agender is a very small deviation from the norm that most people rarely, if ever, encounter in any meaningful fashion, and many languages have not only gendered pronouns, but gendered nouns as well (French, for example).
Advice: Just say they're agender when the party meets them. Distracted players seem to unconsciously assign binary genders to ambiguous characters (this goes for GM-players like me as well), so you gotta head that off as soon as possible.
In fairness, I think what happened in our situation was that we were introducing a whole bunch of characters at once and it got super confusing, and the NPC being agender wasn't forthrightly stated, and they kinda were underground for a while in the story, so it all got muddled up over time.
Personally, I just state to my players 'an androgynous individual addresses you' or something of the sort, and just keep using 'they', and stress the lack of gender indentifiers. I had this backfire once by a real douchebag constantly using the wrong pronouns, even after being corrected, and since then the character has been constantly misgendered. Thankfully that guy isn't in my games anymore, but mostly because he flaked out and we stopped bothering to invite him.
How about:
GM: "You see who you have been told is Lieutenant Ayar waiting to show you to your place at the battlements. They are human, about 5 and a half-feet tall, wearing well-polished half-plate armor, and they have a well-kept scimitar in a scabbard at their hip. They have medium length brown hair and green eyes."
Player 1: "I want to ask him--her--wait, I'm not actually sure. Are they a guy or a girl?"
GM: "Let me double-check the stat block. Here it is--neither, actually. Agender--just refer to them as 'they' or 'them.'
Player 1: "Okay. So, I want to ask them..."
We have these kinds of conversations all the time. Introduce someone with the information available (even if we're the ones who wrote it), and check when we get questions. In this case, you don't need a concrete reason for your player to know it. Your GM has told you. It's not as if you need concrete evidence that the person you're talking to is male or female, either--the GM mentions it, probably with a 'he' or 'she' pronoun, and so you take it as face value. This is the same thing.
That's certainly a better way to handle things; the players asking if they want to is a bit more natural and, thinking about it, it does happen a lot.
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Why am I always the bad guy or the one decidedly in the wrong? People do make presumptions and, if those presumptions are incorrect, they get corrected. No big deal.
What do you mean "prompts the PCs to ask before making presumptions about pronouns"? Are you wanting the players to ask "what is this character's gender identity?" about every NPC they meet? Or worse, ask every NPC they meet IN-CHARACTER?
Not calling you a bad guy, and very willing to discus further via PM if you'd like.
Robin-Shidh offered an excellent example of what prompting a character to ask means. (Edit: which you noticed!) You don't need to ask if you already know, and most gendered NPCs will present their gender openly. You only need to ask the question if you don't know or gender is unclear.
Edit: I think we've reached mutual understanding?
One of my players, Aibek has gone for over a year in that game without referring to themselves by a gender pronoun. In fairness, the rest of us slip up, but the bulk of the other players didn't even spot what they were doing for several months.
It's only one facet of that character - a shadow enfused polyamorous Witchwolf is going to be a little complicated - but it's one the player has played consistently, and I try to keep up.
My advice for the GM is this - you're going to slip up and use a gender if you know one. Try to avoid that if you can. It's a lot easier to say 'they' if that's how you think of the character. I was around when the player was making Aibek, and knew their original gender - it occasionally comes out in posts.
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One of my players, Aibek has gone for over a year in that game without referring to themselves by a gender pronoun. In fairness, the rest of us slip up, but the bulk of the other players didn't even spot what they were doing for several months.
It's only one facet of that character - a shadow enfused polyamorous Witchwolf is going to be a little complicated - but it's one the player has played consistently, and I try to keep up.
My advice for the GM is this - you're going to slip up and use a gender if you know one. Try to avoid that if you can. It's a lot easier to say 'they' if that's how you think of the character. I was around when the player was making Aibek, and knew their original gender - it occasionally comes out in posts.
As an example of this...
Melissa Scott wrote a sf novel in the 80s called The Kindly Ones. It was written in first person and the gender of the narrator was never revealed, even in the sex scene, and because it took place in an alien culture you couldn't use gender roles for definitive clues. (This was not an agender character -- everyone in the book knew their gender, it was just the reader who didn't know. The purpose of hiding this had more to do with exploring feminism and taboos against homosexuality.)
I was talking with someone later about the book, and they asked me what gender I thought the main character was. We then got into an argument, because I was certain the narrator's gender had been established as female early in the book, and so never picked up on any of the gender games that were being played.
It was only later that I figured out that gender was never disclosed in the book, but that female pronouns were used in the synopsis *on the book jacket* and that had been enough to solidify my perception of the narrator.
The Kindly Ones is well worth a read, btw, even without any gender stuff going on. As is Melissa Scott's stuff in general.
It was only later that I figured out that gender was never disclosed in the book, but that female pronouns were used in the synopsis *on the book jacket* and that had been enough to solidify my perception of the narrator.
If there was nothing to counter what something on the book told you, then that's perfectly reasonable to have been mistaken. It's a case of having no counterargument, and it's the fault of whoever designed the covers.
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If there was nothing to counter what something on the book told you, then that's perfectly reasonable to have been mistaken. It's a case of having no counterargument, and it's the fault of whoever designed the covers.
It was only later that I figured out that gender was never disclosed in the book, but that female pronouns were used in the synopsis *on the book jacket* and that had been enough to solidify my perception of the narrator.
Oh absolutely. And as authors have zero control over what's on the book jacket, I figure Melissa Scott must have been pissed when she found out about this, after the fact.
This was all on the Book Club edition, which wasn't the main printing, so I don't think it was a universal experience for readers.
I think you're misinterpreting my post. I wasn't addressing the "Don't Do It" Brigade. I was talking to Claxon, who had chosen to contribute to the thread's main purpose by suggesting that other players might not get the gender right.
I wouldn't consider myself to be part of a "don't do it" brigade. I advised caution, not outlawing it.
The request could quite well be legitimate, and be in no way disruptive. It's just that it's an easily sensitive subject, therefore it's easier for things to spiral out of control. NPCs discriminating against an non gendered or racialized (ex: black, or any other RL discriminated group) character could much more easily trigger or hurt a player than one discriminated for things real life people have a harder time relating to (magic use, being an orc, etc.). While some people can use roleplay as a thin veil to spread their hateful views, it can also be perfectly legitimate for someone to roleplay hateful characters. But sometimes the line between a player's thoughts and his characters' can be blurry... and this is the kind of sensitive topic that can leave scars.
You know your players more than I do, though. If it's in good spirits and they are all mature, odds are there shouldn't be any problems with it. Defining a character's personality is not in itself disruptive.