Simmilar ... i wouldnt want them to expect me to be whatever i pick in character creation ... i would want them to presume that im what they see, and have option to corect them.
But since i can imagine some people can be quite frustrated from this ... i gues it wouldnt add much to the game experience. :-/
Yep, that’s kind of where I got to as well, and why I said I couldn’t think of a workable significant improvement on the current approach, particularly when you add in the complexity of having to then determine for each appearance what gender they “look like†which might be obvious in some cases but less so in others. Particularly some of the female faces read as relatively androgynous to me, and even with the current female body model, if the NPC is wearing armour that de-emphasises their curves and doesn’t have a “feminine†hairstyle then different characters might jump to different conclusions about their gender. And that’s using my real world assumptions, which for all we know might differ from Toril’s. Only difference is, I’m not sure that I’d say that I’d “want†NPCs to assume my character’s gender based on their appearance so much as thinking it would probably be more realistic in some circumstances so I can see the potential benefit, as well as the possible frustration you also mention.
Oh, and yes I can see that in a language like Czech, if it is more often going to be obvious what gender NPCs are assuming your PC is, this is going to take on greater importance. It is lucky for me that in English it’s easier to fudge, though I think in other languages it would be easier still. I think I’ve heard Finnish doesn’t even use gendered personal pronouns?
Btw, do we have any indication from canon sources whether and how Faerun’s various languages, and specifically Common (which I guess we’re meant to be speaking in BG3) approach gender when it comes to pronouns or grammar more generally? I guess one way of handwaving oddities with respect to gendered language might be to say they’re due to imperfections in translations into our Earth languages from Common, though even as I say that it’s not sounding particularly convincing!
