Female PCs and Gender Silliness

I'm going to leave most of the subject of (mis)gendered NPCs alone. But, I do have one comment.

A kobold(/chieftan/lord) has a CHA stat of 4/5/6, with INT and WIS to match. Rondol has an 8.
Guugzamesh has stats of 10. The wiki does not have stats for lesser goblins but I assume they are around 5/6/7; again, INT/WIS match.
Most orcs have CHA of 4. Generals get up to 7, with Ur-Khan having an 8. Orcs actually do have functional INT and WIS, though.

We are talking about abysmally low attributes here, barely better than a skeleton (3 CHA). A hedgehog has better charisma/int/wis than most of these, at 6/5/5; most other animals have comparable attributes (rats, for example, are 4/5/5... still better than a basic kobold)

While kobolds, goblins, and orcs certainly have some sort of society and social order (as indicated by ranks), it may be that they are simply viewed as barely better than animals by most other humanoids. I doubt the Dark Knighthood trades with the great Hedgehog Hedgemony; why would they treat kobolds any differently?

That all aside, there are other reasonably valid explanations for referring to these creatures as "it". For example, it may simply be that morphologically, male and female monstrous humanoids are nearly indistinguishable. It would not be unprecedented - many animals on Earth are difficult to sex. Perhaps it would require a high INT or WIS score to be able to tell the difference. Additionally, they may actually simply all be sexless: creatures spawned by Cruentus for the sole purpose of war and violence.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be sexed/gendered orcs etc. Just some food for thought.

Follow up: do people actually scum-start this game? The difference between characters (beyond talents, which are not always immediately evident) seems pretty small, and easily overcome.

I started to start-scum when I discovered just how much ommel cerumen it can take to reach the Wis level needed to science talk archangels. Training rate seems to correlate somewhat with starting value, and a low training rate has a big effect on the amount of resources the player needs to spend to unlock all materials.

Mental stats aside, bad leg strength makes starving to death in UT much more likely, and bad physical stats in general make getting killed in UT more likely. Which initially is fun, but once you've exhausted most of the possibilities for dying in UT it can be more attractive to spend a couple of minutes getting a start that will more reliably take you further.

I'm not the only one; I've seen evidence of start-scumming (dozens of characters that cowardly quit the game on the world map with 0 points) in JoKe's highscore screenshots from 0507 (IIRC).

+1
Yeah I don't think it has anything to do with charisma. It's just that there's no discernible difference, or they don't have a sex at all.

Look at the animals vs. the humanoids:

- lions have a visible difference (mane), and I think all the lions in game have a mane. But they're still referred to as "it" not "he" right?

- That makes me think it has less to do with charisma and more with intelligence. The "it" seems to me more referring to them as savage creatures with lower intelligence. And of course this is relative - to the humans the kobolds are savage dumb brutes, even though they may have their own society

- for animals that don't have a visible difference, it would be strange to say "he" or "she" - how can the player tell? (The odd exception is the adult male vs. female carnivorous mutant bunnies. Maybe we should remove those gender modifiers and just call them "adult")

- the same should apply to kobolds, orcs, etc. They're all ugly, their gender bits are covered by clothing, so the player can't tell. I do think it would be somewhat interesting to read "she blocks your attack" or "he hits you" when fighting a goblin. But we should look at each species individually and decide which ones have a discernible difference. The NPCs have an assigned gender because they're relatively famous - the player recognizes them, knows who they are.

While Cha does probably reflect both appearence and social skills, I see no problem with high-Cha player being all sunshine and honey when talking to others, but call them 'it' in game messages. High Cha would basically equal to being a sociopath, which I find disturbingly funny.


Yeah, I think it really reflects the humans' view of "lesser races".


Definitely. I still want to have kobold whelps and goblin grannies.

I wish I had some time off work to participate in this fascinating discussion a bit more.


It can and it will. Can we have a list of suggested changes? Chuck it in the Tomb thread if you like. I wonder if Xinroch might have been female after all?

I wonder if it is possible to randomize starting gender for characters like darkknights? Could be a good rudimentary first step.

I can see two ways to randomise characters' gender:
1. Make the existing character prototype abstract and add one configuration for each pronoun set that that character type can have.
2. If the pronoun attribute is a database value that is independently mutable for each unit (so, not returned from a function and not stored only in the character prototype), then it could be altered programmatically when each character spawns.

I'll have to take another look at the Xinroch levels and characters before I make concrete suggestions in the Xinroch thread. But randomised dark knight genders and a female master tomb guard/Xinroch/both sound like a good start.

I found this in the news. Seems like the world is crapsack.

So, this is what I understand(?) :

Pronoun: is an identifier for the character during messages?
Sex: What possibilities there are for procreating?
Gender: Social identifier in-game, self-defined? (x5 flavours)
Appearance attributes a la:

I feel like I need a colour-coded table to understand more clearly.

He didn't start off too badly but sighhhhhh.

More or less.
Pronouns: As you said. The x5 flavours apply here, not to gender (see pronoun.is/she for an example).
Sex: As you said, but also includes biological aspects such as shape/location of genitalia, gametes produced, hormones, chromosomal configuration, and secondary sex characteristics such as breast and facial hair growth. Often these do not all match the assigned sex at birth, for a variety of reasons.
Gender: As you said, but the x5 flavours apply elsewhere.
Appearance/presentation: As you said. In the real world it also includes things that would be more difficult to let the player change in IVAN (like the clothing styles that various NPC types have), or superfluous (like wearing wigs or binding breasts - there's not much point in the game distinguishing these options from simply having long hair and no breasts).
Edit: That is the worst purple for this forum Sorry rainbow, no purple for you.
And if you'd like a less ad-hoc, more community-vetted explanation of the real-world background to this, there's Not Your Mom's Trans 101.

Ok so the five pronouns are he, she, they and which two others?

Meanwhile, I found a piss-take on the kiwi accent: http://pronoun.is/hu

You got columns and rows switched. For example, the five pronoun forms for 'she' are she/her/her/hers/herself. For 'he' the five forms are he/him/his/his/himself. There's a table at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_personal_pronouns#Basic

If you have 5 text fields, you can specify any pronoun set in the .dat files without having to hardcode any rules about their spelling. Although in the case of singular 'they' it's also necessary to specify that verbs conjugate like the plural 'they'. That way the game would correctly print messages like:
At present the game only needs three of the pronoun forms. The 'hers' and 'herself' forms are less commonly used in English and this is reflected in the game text.

I think the 'hu' pronoun set is 'human' themed, but that's another way of looking at it!

Holy wall of text Batman.
I've got to weigh in on this one, if only to state my opinion and/or play devil's advocate where necessary.

I notice a lot of what I'm addressing has already been addressed so please excuse me there.


It does, and remember this is a game written way back beginning in the early 2000s when such issues weren't really at the forefront, unlike recent years.
The devs are not particularly subtle about their choices, have a read through Dialog.txt in the github if you get the chance, should give you a fair idea of their general attitude.


Since trans is undefined and unused in the actual game, it's likely it's just using placeholders (i.e. the "she" pronoun).
Also again a reminder that the game is from early 2000s. I remember reading somewhere in the old documents that there were plans for a "Tranny" npc or status ailment if that helps shed some light on that (and the choice of language).

As the code is currently unimplemented, there's no reason why we can't just rename or remove it as appropriate.


With the exception (or not?) of Petrus' wives, all unnamed human NPCs are defined by their jobs.
Remember that IVAN is set a feudal shithole world run by a maybe-not-so-benevolent-dictator-ultra-priest and with that comes old-fashioned ideas and roles.
That means (at least in places ruled by Petrus) that men do the "hard work" and the women are restricted to house labor.
Therefore the male NPCs are called farmer, hunter, banana grower etc. and likewise the women are named by their occupation - slave, housewife, priestess etc.

Petrus' wives' occupation is simply... well to sit around, be married to Petrus and be used as sex slaves basically. That's just how it is.

Oh there's also the tourists which have male/female/child variants but it's commonplace to refer to tourists as, well, tourists. That is in fact an exception to the whole occupation thing.

Red Kangaroo and Serin have also echoed some of my thoughts on this in an earlier post.
In short, Attnam is not a modern-day happy place of diversity and gender equality and it would make no sense to change that as you'd be tipping the game world on its head and alienating everyone.

However, I am too am all for more diverse (or inverted?) gender roles in different towns not ruled by Petrus. There's no reason to not have a little fun with different towns as we go further into development.

I also support the idea of allowing more females to science talk but feel like only the Priestess of Silva is qualified to meet the criteria here.
The housewives, slaves and Petrus wives are, well, trained to just be homemakers and/or slaves so it doesn't make sense for them to hold an enlightening conversation when it's unlikely they received any kind of academic education.
But given we can sci-talk with a dog, I think there's some leeway for letting them sci-talk at a low level, unless we consider the dog-sci-talk as more of a joke than anything.
Mistresses are skilled in only fighting and sex so it also makes sense for them to not have a high sci-talk level.


Since the "sex" attribute is never directly referenced in game, there's no real need to change it in the code, but at the same time if people really wanted to I can agree that it would in fact be better represented as "pronoun", especially since the code to retrieve the pronoun is called "get pronoun". However, as I said, this is not a user-facing change and therefore not necessary.

A person might think that mutant bunnies are an exception, but they actually have their own entry per sex in the script files, so they don't actually pull from the Sex attribute in-game.

As for referring to monsters as "it" I'd like to offer another perspective:
You're not playing an all-knowing monster encyclopedia of a character. You were raised by hippos. You are not smart. The only way you learn and become smarter is by reading books about gods and talking about science with people, which isn't really relevant to say, identifying the sex of a given monster or animal.
If you can't immediately tell what a monster is by looking at it and using common sense, then it makes absolute sense for the player to refer to the monster as "it".

For example, in the case of a lion, as far as you know all lions have manes. Maybe Kaethos could've told you or maybe you heard about them from somewhere but they're not native to Tweraif so you wouldn't really know for sure.
To make things even more confusing, maned female lions are also a thing in the real world.

In the case of zombies of humans... well maybe their identifying features have rotted off. It's also pretty common practice to refer to zombies as "it" to begin with.

Goblins we can probably put under the umbrella of specifically calling them "it" to be derogatory (because they're horrible creatures) and/or because it's hard for our not-very-smart human to tell sex at a glance.

As for Orcs, depending on the game's interpretation of what orcs are, they may be an entirely male race, and undefined sex race (e.g. 40k fungus orcs) or perhaps are just a regular race of males and females and the only ones we see in-game currently are the males because they are the ones geared up and sent out to do battle.
In this case, I see our pronoun options for orcs being "he" (assuming the player knows the stuff mentioned earlier) or "it" as derogatory.

Again mutant bunnies are the exception here (since you can't tell at a glance what sex a rabbit is without having in-depth knowledge of them) but that might be a gameplay issue since it lets you know that two bunnies might mate and produce more horrid offspring to kill.

I do like the idea of CHA raising and causing subtle changes to how the player refers to things though.


While I am tentatively fine with the idea of the player being referred to as whatever pronouns (since it's meant to be you and you can make your own decisions about that) I don't agree with allowing for a range of pronouns for other characters.

This goes back to the same idea of the character referring to things using "it" if they don't know how to identify sex at a glance - you're raised by hippos and adopted into a society that strictly uses "he" or "she" pronouns. Potentially "they" when unsure.
It would not make sense for the player to say, use the look command and hover over an NPC and see, for example "A Lunethia guard stands here. Xhe does not care about you" because it would make sense that the player, being from a society that uses only "he" or "she" to try to use what they believe is the most appropriate pronoun.

Dialog from NPCs however could be fine, as the player would be able to audibly hear what the person is saying and any confusion produced on the part of the actual real-life player of the game would make perfect sense and be entirely appropriate.
e.g. "Don't trust what that shopkeeper, Dunhasurd has to say - zhri is a serial liar and all of zhris merchandise is old and shabby."


I am fine with this and think it would be a splendid idea (and not just because I like my hair sprites).
However I like the idea of having a randomly assigned player character even better. i.e. no choice of whether your player is male or female.
Perhaps the idea of being able to assign pronouns would best be relegated to a menu option, and otherwise defaulted to player sex? Idk.

I also like the idea of randomized hair, facial or otherwise regardless of sex but still influenced by WIS/INT.


Yeah I don't think we'd be able to get recognizable breasts rendered in the small space we're given either. I think it'd be best just to leave the chest bare, although with a different sprite for male/female so they are distinct.
Maybe with a little definition, but there's no way we're going to have breasts and nipples rendered in pristine HD-for-sprite-based-game quality without making every female look like a triple G cup.

Even if we could I don't think anyone's really going to get up in arms over 16x16 exposed boobies.

That's my two cents.

Adding on to this part. A lot of these are obviously up to interpretation, but here's my comments:

Angels - I agree, I'm fine with them being 100% female.
Gibberling - these are actually from DnD and very similar to goblins, but hairier and louder. IVAN's ones don't use weapons though. They're not as smart as goblins either.
Goblins - see my earlier post, I think male/female is fine but the player wouldn't be able to identify them at a glance so "it" would still be used.
Imp - generally up to interpretation but as far as I've seen they're predominantly sexless but with male appearance.
Dwarves - I agree with your interpretation and also like the idea of Terry Pratchett dwarves.
Kobold - see Goblins
Mistresses - basically what you mentioned but it's also worth noting that they are servants of Nefas, the goddess of forbidden pleasures (which may explain their appearance and tendencies)
Orcs - see my earlier post. It's up for interpretation.
Punisher - I'm 99.9% sure there's only meant to be the one Punisher, and he's Attnamese so he'd be a male. The reason I'm so sure there's only one is because he has a line stating his cousin is the banana grower encourager - wouldn't make sense for a group of punishers to have the same cousin.
Siren - agreed entirely. If we implement harpies/mermaids/lamias etc. they should also be female-only for the same reasons.
Skeletons - agreed. Any defining bits are long gone, and we don't have modern scientists around who can identify sex by bone structure anyway.
Werewolf - entirely agreed, and seconded!
Zombies - already covered in my previous post

Farmers/hunters/guards - we can add female versions of these if they're going to be re-used in more "free" societies in-game but the ones in Attnam should remain male only.

lots of good points 4zb4

For the charisma thing, isn't charisma sort of tied into leadership / honor / esteem? If so wouldn't someone with higher charisma actually treat lower creatures / poorer people with more respect? So I kind of feel like the charisma thing is backwards if we do implement that

This is true. Especially if we're going to have more non-human shops and civilizations.

I feel like maybe instead super-high INT might incur the "asshole effect" if you do not also have high CHA.
Thought that would just be making a jab at the sorts of "intelligent" people I happen to know.

In fact I'd like to make a bunch of subtle changes to the language used based on stats, just for flavor's sake.
e.g. low INT would start using dumb language like "a two-hunded sward are there", high INT starts using more colourful language like "A skeleton warrior menaces here" (instead of "is standing here")

I like that

...

Yeah, no. I'm not weighing in on this, but I just wanna say this.

The PC was raised by hippos, and you routinely butcher and eat various creatures including humanoids like gibberlings. One could argue that as a wild-child the PC might be able to differentiate sex better than anyone. Alternatively you could argue that precisely because of the lack of education the PC goes around assuming people's genders, right or wrong. There's no need to get super technical about pronoun usage because it can be argued either way. Let's not forget that the very premise of the game isn't politically correct.

Well, we could make the housewives sci-talk about cooking, laundry, kids (cooking kids ).

I know I'm suggesting this in gender equality thread. Please don't throw me to angry housewives.


I like this explanation!





I too think it's mostly for gameplay reasons that bunnies have noted genders. Even though you generally slaughter them all, so it doesn't make that much of a difference.


Agreed.


Why not.


I think this would be the best, too.


That actually sounds great. Way better than picking your pronoun at each game start.


I like this.


Yeah, and it should retain it's humor and silly jokes. But I think it's possible to try some changes and not go overboard.

Would people like it better if there were different options for character creation? i.e. in the IVAN configuration screen you could select from, for example, "Classic", "Quick" or "Detailed" character generation methods that operate when loading a new game.

I'm planning on having a similar range options for world map generation, although probably not as as great a range of options as character generation would have.

Sounds like a good candidate for a Settings menu option.
Should default to classic IVAN of course.

And someone will have to put in the work for the more detailed options.

Also remember that they made IVAN when they were quite young - didn't it start as a high-school project? Also also, remember that they are Finnish - they may be fluent in English but it is not their first language, nor are they accustomed to the intricacies of the language as used in the U.S. and elsewhere.

All this only provides an excuse for the original devs' language use. And last I checked, nobody was blaming them. What this is not, is a valid argument against making changes now. To draw a grossly broad metaphor, it would be like arguing against repealing Jim Crow laws because "it was a different time back then".

I would much prefer an option in the menu for "random / ask / <list of values or whatever>" . That way, you are never prompted when making a character besides when you go into the options and specify to ask. Think of the option for the starting pet name.

I agree, it would be much more streamlined to have a player-specified default config.