I just want to register my appreciation with the makers of Talisman for including so many female characters in this edition. 50% of the new characters in the Dragon expansion are women, and I think that was the case, too, with the Highlands expansion. I've been playing Talisman since I was a kid (my dad's first (or second?) edition copy), and I remember feeling at the time like I was such a gender freak for being so into that game. My thought process was: Talisman must be a game for guys, because why else would there be so few female characters in it? I realize that most Talisman players *were*, and are, male, and that therefore including only a few female characters made sense. But I sometimes wondered, and still wonder, whether including only a few female characters sent out the message to potential female players that Talisman wasn't a game that girls were supposed to play, which, in turn, reinforced the low female player ratio.

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks.

I also like the way FFG reshape old male characters into females.

I'm a guy but I still like female characters

Haha, yeah.. though Ive never given the character gender ratio much thought I think its noticeable that all rules/cards etc always says "he must...", "he draws cards...". It clearly states that girls never play talisman ^^

Some games like Prophecy (or is it Return of the Heroes) assume only girls play!

Ell.

Nioreh said:

My girlfriend and I have discussed this too. It doesn't seem so hard to just write "the player" instead using a gender specific pronoun. The original version came out 30 years ago so I'll cut them some slack, but I think FFG really dropped the ball on the Fourth edition by not making a change. It's just a silly little game, but a lot of people believe that subtle sexism like this is to blame for a lot of the gender bias we see in the world today. By saying "he" consistently the makers are vey clearly saying that this is a game for males.

Though, like the OP said, I do have to give them some props for including a nice variety of ass-kicking female characters!

Writing "he" to stand for both "he" and "she" is sexist, and not even subtly; it's just so pervasive, most people don't notice it or consider it worthy of analysis. "The player" doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to write. Or if that takes up too much text space, alternating "she" and "he" is an option. Still, I appreciate the progress Talisman has made. 50/50 female/male characters in two expansion packs... I don't think I've ever seen that in a game. I'm so stoked it's happened in Talisman, best board game ever created.

It is not sexist at all. That's just this PC world gone mad. It's just the way the rules are written. Get over it for christ sake.

Ell.

See what I mean? It's so pervasive, people don't question it, and when someone else does question it, those who've internalized it so much that they don't view it as being sexist become offended or upset, throwing out arguments like: "That's just how the grammar rules are written, so that's just how it is. Now shut up about it."

@talismanamsilat: If the rules said you're supposed to always write "she" to stand for both "he" and "she," I'm assuming you wouldn't have a problem with it or see it as being sexist? That you would just go along with it, viewing the people who made that rule as being unbiased and not to be questioned simply because they are the rule-makers?

I couldn't care less whether it said he or she. I'm not offended by that in any way and some games use the word she throughout. Should I claim that is sexist too???

Ell.

I would definitely say that using "she" exclusively is sexist. Which games do that?

Either Prophecy or Return of the Heroes. Would have to dig them out of my games collection to check!

Ell.

Whichever one of those games uses "she" exclusively to stand for both genders is just as sexist as each of the millions of games and documents that uses "he" exclusively to stand for both genders.

Anything is better than "s/he."

No disrespect intended, Jenna, but I'm with Ell on this one. I think you're overly sensitive on the subject.

IIRC the 3E AD&D rules would just use either he or she, seemingly at random. I thought that was cool, if they wanted to make that effort. But truly, are there not bigger fish to fry in pursuing gender equality than this quibble?

I think everything is worth looking at with regards to gender equality. I don't spend 24 hours a day fighting the let's-use-"he"-to-stand-for-everyrone topic, because, as you say, it's not like it's the biggest problem in gender equalism. But I think that to pretend that it isn't an issue at all or that it doesn't merit some discussion is foolish. And when someone says that it just flat-out doesn't matter on any level, that using "he" exculsively, almost everywhere, doesn't play on our overall psyche about whether women matter as much as men, well, I'm going to contest it because, obviously, I disagree.

Anyway, this thread has strayed from anything Talisman, so I'm going to stop posting in it. You think that the he-only thing doesn't matter; I do. None of us is changing our minds.

This is a fun topic. I grew up speaking both French and English, and now I teach several languages, both modern and classical. My take :

In French, as in most European languages, there are two "genders": that is, two groups of nouns that are classified by certain grammatical rules they follow. The words for 'man' and 'woman' happen to fall into opposite camps, and so we say for the sake of efficiency that tables have "feminine" gender but boats have "masculine". Neither has genitalia; it's just shorthand for "belonging to that same group of nouns". So it's "la table", but "le bateau". There's no sense of actual gender involved, and I think a lot of trouble might have been saved if old grammarians had just called them "group A nouns" and "group B nouns".

Now, when you're referring to people, of course they have actual (not just grammatical) gender. So it's "le garcon" and "la fille". But when you have a pronoun, you have to choose gender. Masculine takes "il", (like the English "he") and feminine "elle" ("she"). In the plural, "ils" and "elles" (in English, you just have "they"). A group of boys is referred to as "ils". A group of girls as "elles". A mix of boys and girls, however, needs to choose one or the other, and the grammatical (not social, not sexist) rule is that you default to the masculine. Thus, a group of 99 girls and one boy is "ils".

Generally speaking, people avoid the issue by fleeing into the plural "They", but this often distorts or even ruins the grammar of a sentence. "Each person should wear their hat when going outdoors" is a horrible sentence. "Each person" clearly refers to a series of individuals, and the proper sentence should read, "Each person should wear HIS hat when going outdoors." There is no sense here that girls are being asked to freeze.

Long ago, Old English used gender for all nouns, just like French. Now, the only place we still have vestiges of inflection and gender are in the pronouns. It's like an appendix, or some vestigial leftover from an older organism. So we no longer give gender to tables or boats, but we still do to people. The old rules still apply, but we now think they have always referred only to people with genitals. In English, as in other European languages, the default is to the masculine when speaking of mixed groups. I am aware that this is politically charged, but that disappears when you consider linguistic history. We get embarrassed about excluding genders, and we end up with clunkers like "s/he", or "he or she", or the ubiquitous cowardly plural. This works on legal forms and so forth, but it clearly isn't natural language. It simply doesn't work like that.

We should be grateful we don't speak Latin daily (most of us, anyway). It has three genders, the Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter. German does too. I think it was Richard Lederer who worried about excluding the neuter, and proposed the pronoun "he or she or it", which of course is abbreviated to "h'orsh'it"

I kid. Look, the exclusion of women is real and horrible and ongoing in society, even my own, which I think is pretty progressive, comparatively speaking. But the use of the masculine as a default setting for pronouns is simply good grammar. Its origins are linguistic, not sexist. And I certainly don't think that the use of 'he' in board game rules, even if it were sexist, really matters all that much when you consider the real challenges women face in many countries across the globe, including here, as several of you have mentioned. Still, if some historico-linguistic context can help, it's not really an issue of the deliberate exclusion of women ... it's kind of mostly just a problem with pronouns in English, which act as if they were still living a thousand years ago.