No need for gendered pronouns to refer to nonspecific characters

[Desna's Avatar]

Vic Ferrari wrote:

5th Ed seems to avoid this, by simply using "you" and "your", throughout.

Correct, and when "you" and "your" isn't feasible, 5th Ed. uses "he or she" and "him or her". It's far more common-sensical, inclusive, appropriate, and reasonable than the PF2 Playtest approach to assume female gender throughout.

[MaxAstro]

Personally, I like Exalted's approach to this: They always refer to the Storyteller as "she" and always refer to the player as "he", but more importantly they have a cutout near the start of the book explaining that they do this and why.

[ErichAD]

I didn't really notice the pronouns on reading, but aren't they still using the iconic's respective pronouns in examples? Shaving off a couple letters for every "their" to "she/her" seems fine. You could cut down further and go to male for "his/he" or first person "I/My" I suppose to really shave it down.

Please don't go first person. I can't read a game manual written like that.

This seems like the most minor of editorial concerns. I'd recommend leaving it to the non-native English speakers to debate over as those like myself are probably going to be fine however you chose to do it.

It could be fun to use one of the iconics as your iconic DM. I remember hearing one or two lost their job as a class iconic so it would be nice to give them a spot. My memory of that is fuzzy though, so I could be wrong. The iconic medium could be a better choice due to the relationship between card reading and storytelling in Golarion.

[PossibleCabbage]

I always imagined that the "Unspecified GM" who gets the She/Her pronouns is supposed to be Lisa Stevens.

[RazarTuk]

Steve Geddes wrote:

“They” has been widely used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for quite some time, though it is by no means universal.

"They" for an indefinite singular antecedent has been around since Shakespeare, although the modern usage as "It, but acceptable to refer to humans as" is, well, modern.

[master_marshmallow]

Let the devs be agents in the book, for the purposes of demonstrations. Use names like Logan, Mark, Lisa, Erik, and Stephen.

But not James or Jason.

[ErichAD]

Real people feels creepy to me, but that's probably just me, so whatever. Using all common western European/American names is probably easy for a good chunk of their audience.

Is there an iconic for the harrower prestige class? They'd make a good GM candidate for sure.

[Irontruth]

No, all names should be names from the game. This makes example text feel more "in character", and helps promote the usage of character names at the table as well.

[the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh]

RazarTuk wrote:

Steve Geddes wrote:

“They” has been widely used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for quite some time, though it is by no means universal.

"They" for an indefinite singular antecedent has been around since Shakespeare, although the modern usage as "It, but acceptable to refer to humans as" is, well, modern.

Around since Chaucer, iirc.

[RazarTuk]

the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:

RazarTuk wrote:

Steve Geddes wrote:

“They” has been widely used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for quite some time, though it is by no means universal.

"They" for an indefinite singular antecedent has been around since Shakespeare, although the modern usage as "It, but acceptable to refer to humans as" is, well, modern.

Around since Chaucer, iirc.

Wouldn't know, but he's Middle English, anyway. Point is, the only modern innovation with the singular "they" is using to refer to a specific person. We've been using it for indefinite people possibly for as long as we've been speaking Modern English.

[Epic Meepo]

Several years ago, while experimenting with ways to make rules text more concise, I discovered that replacing all pronouns in the PRD with "you" and "your" whenever possible (and changing sentence structure, accordingly) reduced the size of the document by several thousand words.

Quite literally, the PF1 Core Rulebook could have included multiple pages of additional content if it had used "you" and "your" instead of third-person pronouns. In English, the sentence structure you use when speaking directly to the reader can be surprisingly efficient.