Just a roll call for the gen-- err… la-- ugh… yes.
I’m more or less cis myself, but hearing friends raving over that particular feature was how I got into FL in the first place! Sunless Sea’s system works still better, and I do hope it’s implemented in FL proper at some point in the future.
Yay! Not alone! ^_^
What makes it extra sweet for me, is that the typical reaction {as quoted above} is actually a pretty accurate example of how some people address me irl. XD
How does it work in Sunless Sea? I haven’t played it yet.
edited by Taciturn Masseur on 6/20/2014
In Sunless Sea, you can choose how people address you (including masculine, feminine and neutral terms of address), and choose your portrait, and any terms can be matched with any portrait. Only about half of the total FL portraits are available, but still a bigger and more diverse range than are available to any given FL character.
I present rather binary (binarily? binary-ery-ry? whatever) but… well, I’ll put the kettle on and get us some fondant fancies, shall I?
Hi! Functionally cis in meatspace for convenience and I adore the option. My main (well, first, since another may have taken priority as of late) character is one of those individuals constantly causing others to fumble their greetings. However awkward (or grating) this has or hasn’t yet become from repetition, the initial experience of being addressed as such is still fondly remembered as the focal point of introduction to Fallen London.
That Sunless Sea doesn’t segregate portraits by gender is fantastic. A little disappointing that they were recycled from FL and not in full, but my personal disappointment was mitigated by the portraits preset to the one I selected first. I mean, which face should greet me by default but
the first one I ever selected. I got a kick out of that. Further, before I had any idea what player characters could get up to in the Neath, I had sort of envisioned mine as vaguely ecclesiastical. (And thus settled for being closest to and grinding the Church connection to Allied instead.) So naturally that one priestly background option tickled my fancy. And then my first Sunless Sea character went and died of mere mutiny. Considering the starting stat granted by that background, yeah. All in all, a memorable start.
As for npc representation, I like that, as in Fallen London, there’s a fair few, but extrapolating from narrative interpretation is iffy… whether it’s implicit in how they present, or whether it’s to obscure binary status to some other end or purpose, who can say? ‘The Jeweller’ in relation to Alice’s sister, for example. Of course, the narrative limiting factor: the pc tends to be rather self-absorbed, or so the text seems to indicate, and even if that weren’t so, it’s not a topic for conversation.
You remember how, not toooooooo long ago, a bunch of new portraits were added to FL, and how they included a number of nautical-themed ones - a shaggy sea-dog, a helmet’d diver, a bewhiskered admiral, a lady in a charming tentacle hat, and so on? I suspect that it’s not so much that FL portraits were recycled for SS but that the intended new SS portraits were pre-emptively implemented into FL. (I am surprised that the piratical portrait with the cutlass isn’t among those available in SS, though.
Not toooo long ago? Eh. OK yeah, since you mention it, I guess that’s still recent memory.
Maybe, maybe they dropped cutlass because they didn’t want to give the wrong impression about hand to hand combat. Or they’re saving that one for later, to balance against comparatively lackluster faces in a supplemental batch. Maybe rifle will also make an appearance then too. What we have now are people holding some rather fragile objects. But no magnifying glass. Ah well. Neither of my alts had their portraits make the cut.
Of the various terms of address you can choose for your character, are there any besides ‘captain’ which persist when not chosen? I mean that in some places you still get called Captain, whether or not you prefer it. Which is all fine and dandy. I’m just curious if ‘citizen’ or something else shows up vocatively too. Unless I’ve mixed up which of my short-lived captains was being hailed at the time…