seebs

I think it goes rather further than that; there really are people for whom the pronoun is mostly neutral. I mean, one slightly older bit of text I have lying around says "Male and female created He him", clearly using "him" to refer explicitly to both male and female. Problem is, when you have a word with two meanings, they tend to get blurred. If "he" really means both "third person male" and "third person gender unknown", you can't tell which is intended, which creates a bias towards assuming "male". The ongoing attempt to fix this is interesting just because usually attempts to modify a language by declaration and fiat don't work, but this one has a reasonable chance.

Me, I'm sad to lose "they/their" as unambiguously plural; I recognize that even that was a change from a previous usage, but it was a useful usage to have. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to get people to accept "everyone ... they" than it is to coin a new pronoun and use it.

I was told at one point that English came very close to acquiring a consistently-male third person pronoun.

Of course, the other thing to watch out for remains: It isn't always obvious, when reading a given text, which set of conventions the author used, but assuming they used a particular set of conventions may result in misreading.

Some years back, I wrote a document where I just alternated pronouns from one paragraph to the next. Mostly people have been fine with it, people translating it have asked what it was, and one utterly illiterate person wrote me what I think was a very angry email about it.

I am pretty sure that there are cases in which those assumptions will be incorrect, but I'd guess that they are right substantially more often than they're wrong.

FWIW, I don't much go to the D to RP. I just play in character. Aunt Millie spends her missions kvetching about how much better things were when she was a little girl, usually in deeply improbable ways. ("And the Malta Group had to send Zeus class donkey carts after people who could run sorta fast, and they were GRATEFUL!") Perfect Dork is always trying to sneak around, scout things, and set up traps, even when there's not really a good justification for doing so from a gameplay perspective.

It's a side-effect of coming from D&D, I think; I'm not used to roleplaying as a separate activity, but as a way in which you go about playing the entire game.

Level 25 quad-aspect IO: 14/14/14/14, say, damage/endurance/recharge/accuracy. Total is 56%. Level 50 common IO: Not 56%.

Sub-50 enhancements are not necessarily worse. The set bonuses utterly trump anything else. Look at Basilisk's Gaze, which stops at level 30. 4-piece bonus is *7.5% global recharge*. Figure a typical character has probably 10-15 powers which can use recharge. 7.5% recharge to 10 powers is 75% recharge, or the equivalent of about two +3 SOs. For free. This utterly stomps the 30-50 gap.

So, my advice: You don't have to, but you'll be much better off if you do.

This is actually a pretty good discussion by Internet standards.

Of course, I'm biased, I'm a veteran of Usenet flamewars about the D&D alignment system.

I'm still looking for the other one.