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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Winterthorn" data-source="post: 3768261" data-attributes="member: 1702">I've bunch of thoughts...I appreciate that most of us want to see more women involved in our hobby and certainly the alternating she/he usage in 3E probably made the reading of the rules more inviting for new female players. But I also felt that the obvious alternating method (almost perfectly 50/50 from one class/prestige class to the next) was "forced" and did not flow naturally for some reason. I think if iconic character names were used more than pronouns that would look better. Indeed having an iconic male and iconic female for, say, the four most popular race/class combos (total of 8), would actually be interesting to read and may even create a more storybook feel to reading the rules.I would go too far to suggest perhaps there should be two iconics every time an iconic is needed? If Redgar is retained as the iconic human male fighter, add Cesca as the new iconic tiefling female fighter. Cesca can serve both as combat partner, or foil, of Redgar for the purpose of explaining rules for 4E fighters. Sometimes Redgar is mentioned, other times it's Cesca. Clearly and without confusion. (In fact the rogues in 3E already are "paired": the halfling rogue Lidda and the human rogue Kerwyn - although we haven't seen much of Kerwyn have we? Lidda got all the "rogue attention" it seems.)In lieu of using he or she without the correlation to a named iconic, I'd use the pural 'they' - even risking singular usage now and then. Most monsters can be refered to in the plural, and even the use of 'it' for singular monstrosities will work. And in the case of discussing players rather than their characters, use 'you' and the more archaic 'one', such as when advising the DM or players on how to do something at the metagame level.Of course writing talent, knowing the audience, and context are major elements to successfully managing this issue carefully and with respect to both female and male readers. A good writer can wield this double-edged topic without injuring the innocent or themselves!  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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