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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilja" data-source="post: 6213575" data-attributes="member: 84300">I voted "They" as a generic, but it's a combination...1. Avoid personal pronouns where it doesn't sound forced.2. Use they when discussing a non-specified character, and even more importantly, when discussing players In many cases where writers typically write "he" or "she", it could work equally with both singular they and plural they. I think plural they is the way to go when possible, simply because it's a group activity and anything that reinforces that feeling is great.3. Use the appropriate pronoun when discussing a specific, defined character. At least if their gender is clearly noted; for example characters I kinda like having gender ambiguous ones.Aaaand for me in my writing it's 4. Default to female characters. Why? Because I'm so goddamn tired of the male standard and even if 100% of my characters where female, it would still not make a dent in the statistics in the genre, where nearly all are male. And it's not like males will feel alianated from the hobby, if they don't like my stuff there's still 134345234234 other adventures that will cater to them...The hobby is far from inclusive, and some people like it that way, they like it being their little boys club. Language then becomes an important way for them to show their anti-women politics, staunchly defending the male standard "because of tradition", and claiming any other opinion as "political correctness", as if their stance where apolitical or marginalized.I'd like the hobby to be inclusive, because I want more people to play with. That is my political stance, and yes, I think it's correct. Language is of course just one piece of this (other major parts where the RPGs themselves matter are art, adventure design, NPC design etc), and I'm not in any way saying people defaulting to male pronoun because of being used to it are being deliberately exclusive sexists, but there is no reason to actively defend the status quo when it has landed us in such an excluding environment.EDIT: And on distractions, I recently bought Citadel, the card game, and it was really obnoxious to read because not only did they default to "he" all the time for players, it also used it when it really wasn't necessary.</blockquote>

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