#[ i FOR ONE... BEAT this game... with guides BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT ]

[talenlee]

3e: Prestigious Gender

3rd Edition D&D did, ostensibly, avoid much deliberately and exclusionary gendered language of the fantasy genre from its forebears, which is a little like saying that a rainstorm is less wet than a cyclone. And bear in mind, I am not throwing stones here: it sure is good to have reduced the amount of naked misogyny and ridiculous and unnecessary gendering that persisted across the landscape of an earlier version of the fandom, and I am glad that we then made better and better versions of the same.

There are some out there who right now are thinking this is a great point to complain about something 5e is doing, but:

I don’t know anything about 5e

I really, really don’t care about you fighting with strangers about what 5e is or is not

In prior editions of D&D, and indeed in many fantasy universes before, there were often clear and distinct gendered roles and capacities that characters had access to in the context of a fantasy adventure. You might get a description that only women could be this particular kind of scantily clad drow lady who’s going to whip you, or only men can be this particular kind of easily whipped paladin man.

The way 3e decided to handle gender in most of the books was through a method that’s quaint now but wasn’t actually that bad for the time, which is alternativing he and she in different contexts. One class would be described with he, the next she, the next he, the next she, and while this isn’t good per se, it being used in a pattern like this at least creates an evenness that can lack when you try and make judgment calls about it.

There are all sorts of other biases at work here, though those biases aren’t particularly worth harping on. Going back and beating up the authors of 3e books that range from retired to dead is meaningless stuff. I’m not interested in what they should have done; I’m much more interested in the more curious process of examining what they actually did. The use of gendered language like this is present in the work, but there’s another place where gendering language can show up that players might miss.

Prestige Classes were the spine of how players build characters in 3rd edition. It may have once been conceived of as a game where you’d take a fighter to 20 but it seemed after the prestige class system was widely understood it was a natural progression for everyone to take. Why take level 7 fighter when you could take a level of a class that was more specific to your vision and fantasy? A prestige class was like a class you could take, but it was gated behind some kind of prerequisites that you had to meet. In exchange for these requirements, your levels could be of something specific, with special abilities that set you apart from just, you know, fighter or paladin or whatever.

This system of requirements is also our first place where gender shows up. There were, in fact, a small number of prestige classes where gender was a fixed requirement. I’ve already complained about the women-only Beloved of Valarian, which is good, because it’s a bad class and it indicates some messed up thoughts about sex, agency, and women.

And before I go on, I should clarify that there is a demarcation in D&D prestige class design. If it was in a printed book, it probably was more thoroughly tested and edited and typically, both better to play and less likely to do something broken. That’s not to say that they were all fair – after all, the wizard was in the Player’s Handbook, – but there’s a tier system at work. Things in the Complete books were pretty solid and a reliable balance point to one another. Things in the Dungeon Master’s Guide were ‘safe’ and definitely worked, but also didn’t tend to push the game boundaries very hard. Setting books had their own problems, so things from the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks were probably stronger and a little more broken, and Eberron brought things that sat kind of between Forgotten Realms and Complete books. Then there’s Dragon magazine, which could be considered wholesale speculative options, and often either didn’t work, or were wildly unrepresentative of the rest of the game.

With that in mind, I’m trying to focus on things from the printed sourcebooks. That does catch us the 3.0 prestige class the Eunuch Warlock, which is both the only instance of a male-only prestige class in a printed book and also a class that explains that you need a lot of balls to take on the class’ prerequisites, but not for long.

There’s also the Swanmay, which is a woman-only prestige class, and that’s where we peter out without looking at Dragon magazine classes I never heard of and don’t care about and bonus, aren’t worth worrying about. It helps that Dragon Mgazine options tended to be bad in addition to being badly made.

Anyway, the place I wanted to wind up with is looking at a big list of data and looking for one specific thread of language: How often does the title of a prestige class gender it? And I mean explicitly gender it; the fact that cleric or bishop are terms we normally gender doesn’t make those gendered terms. You know a term is a gendered term in this context if it has a different gendered form or a neutral form that’s not being used. This creates a possible edge case, in the term of the word witch; I’m willing to accept that, certainly back in 3.5, there was a mindset of people thinking witch is a gendered term with the comparative term warlock, even if I disagree.

To that end, I got a big list and I started counting.

Then I slowly stopped counting as I realised the lopsided scope of the problem.

The word ‘lord’ is used in about 15 classes, ignoring its part in the compound word ‘warlord.’ ‘Master’ is somewhere in the district of a hundred uses. ‘Bowman’ even shows up once. And in all that, I found that ‘witch’ showed up four times, ‘queen’ showed up once, and my favourite of all of them, we got one explicitly femme-gendered exotic word: incantatrix.

None of this is surprising or weird. It’s pretty much to be expected. And it’s cool that we get to now, do a better job with this kind of thing.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!