#also its super refreshing to be able to choose nb for the pc and everyone just calls them them and its great

[senselessalchemist]

Baldur's Gate 3 has taken over my life and reminded me I have just the worst taste in fictional men (but truly excellent taste in fictional women)

[chrysanthemumgames]

Could you talk a bit more about why you wanted gender and pronouns to be seperate options? I'm making my own twine game, but I'm kinda confused on how it would affect the story.

Sure! So.

For one, as you probably know, they just are factually separate things. You can be a nonbinary person and use exclusively she/her, and it doesn't make you a woman. One way to handle this coding wise is, of course, to just let people choose the pronouns so the game knows what to display, and let the reader imagine their character as whatever gender they are! And that's totally valid, as long as the game never needs to know what gender they are, which honestly... most don't.

So why bother setting gender at all? Well, as far as I can tell, there's two reasons why you might want to. One is just... a certain sense of official-ness. I think I can safely assert that a lot of nonbinary and trans folks are used to kinda... finessing headcanon and maybe occasionally ignoring canon to be able to sneak in anything that feels like rep of themselves in their player characters, never mind the rest of the game.

Everyone being on the same footing in terms of "your gender is whatever you imagine and the game doesn't declare it" is one way of bringing parity (a way I also use sometimes), but of late I've been kind of coming down on the side of letting the player make it explicit because even if, say, a trans and a cis man are treated exactly the same at all times by the story and the characters because the difference doesn't matter to the game at all, well... I think there's something to be said for the player with the trans PC knowing that the character is trans, is recognized as trans, and is still treated the same by the game. Speaking for myself, it can actually be super refreshing when I play an NB character and the game "knows" but nobody cares or bothers me about it or gets my pronouns wrong haha.

But the second reason you might do something like this (at least that I can think of right now), is that, well, it might make a difference sometimes! I'm not talking about like... writing in discrimination for "historical accuracy" or whatever—I think there's probably a time and place for that, but it'd take a whole lot more effort and sensitivity than most people probably want to give it, etc. But what I'm really referring to is chances for the topic to come up, e.g., with cast members who are also trans, or enby, or what have you. It can be refreshing for it not to matter, but at the same time, generally speaking being of one gender is a different experience than being another, even if that's just in terms of something like 'what other people tend to expect of you.' When you consider being enby, or trans, or fluid, there's additional different life experience on top of that, and it can, sometimes, feel like a lot of what comes one's way in life has to do with it.

And it can be nice, too, if rather than making no difference, this locus of experience is something that can be discussed and shared, particularly with characters in the narrative who would realistically be able to relate. Based on what kind of world it is, gender might not matter too much (it barely does in FoA), but there's still elements of experience that are going to be shared even then. For example, whether or not anyone makes a big deal out of it, Alekto has transitioned. That's a thing she's done, and a PC might also have done. That's a pretty natural thing for them to talk about at a certain point in a friendship.

So even if I just end up giving a few small conversational opportunities for something like this, I think, for a game like FoA, that's worth it, because FoA has a lot of emphasis on getting to know its characters not really because you're all out to save the world/solve the mystery/win the war, but because you're all living together now and need to figure out how to get on. It might not be the kind of thing that fits into every game, and that's okay!