Could we please have some Monster Girls?

[Tinker]

I remembered an awesome blog post from Nandrew a while back, on the female representation in DD: http://www.qcfdesign.com/?p=845

So let me start by saying that I think that it's awesome to have alt avatars for all the race-class combinations. I never get bored of them, even if I reuse the same race for my class I get at least 2 avatars, but if I vary the race (which I often do), I end up with a total of 14 (!) possibilities for each class (7 races x 2 genders). This is totally awesome.

I do wonder though, why are all the monsters in a single-sex (except for gorgon, looks "guys only") club? I'd personally totally love to have alts for the monsters, like "hot sexy vampire chic", "purple female half-dragon (i.e. Matron style)", "big gorgon with pronounced poison fangs", "regal cute rat queen", and of course the "hippie goat chick with sunglasses and tools for alternative medication".

What do you guys think? Players/Devs/Quarter Circle Forward Art Directrices?

(sidenote, might be totally not worth the effort, but it would be cool if the town NPCs also showed some more skin occasionally, like I never trusted my advisor and I would totally dig if a female alt would be available... others also like the demon/taxidermist/blacksmith (btw does she even have a main avatar?).)

[dislekcia]

Short answer: We're not going to add more art to the game now, sorry.

Long answer: Ideally, yes, we'd like to have had different gender depictions for the monster classes. But we didn't like the idea of having specific codified genders either - your phrase "showed some skin" is exactly what we knew we wanted to avoid! Just having the "sexy vampire lady" would have been a cop-out on our part, especially after we worked hard on making the representations of the races' genders feel coherent instead of stereotypical (except for the flower on the goblin assassin, that's our bad). The monster classes were also done quite late in the design, so for some of them we knew we wanted to make them feel either gender neutral or gender-queer. The Vampire and Gorgon are pretty obviously gendered, but what if a Gorgon always looks female to humans? What if in the DD world, vampires grow capes and widow's peaks like fur instead of them being choices? We tried to stay away from anything that would indicate secondary sexual characteristics for all the monster classes and I feel like we pulled that off the best with the Half-Dragon (why isn't that a she?) and sort of got it right for the Goatperson and Rat Monarch. Besides the last two being neutrally named, there's also really nothing in the images that talks to a specific forced interpretation of gender. The Rat Monarch is especially queer in design, the whiskers might be a mustache, or maybe they're just whiskers; The eyelashes are just a tad too long to be solidly male.

P.S. The Matron is purple because she's a true dragon, not a dragonspawn.

[Tinker]

[dislekcia]

I get that often the monster classes are going to be read as specific genders by different people. The trick is getting them to be read as different genders by different people

Damousey has pulled that off quite a few times in prototypes she's made since for game jams. It's always fascinating to watch it happen and then see people fight about if a child character is a "boy" or a "girl"... It usually depends on if they have kids.

Also, I love how in Pratchett's Discworld books humans find it nearly impossible to gender dwarfs and trolls. This makes a ton of sense to me.

[Jelligeth]

[Tinker]

You're using the alt avatars of the non-monster classes to tell us something about the world of DD: how men seem to have lots of facial hair (some races more than others ), how women tend to have these cute bulgy eyes, etc. We are intuitively familiar with the concept of genders; so we understand what DD is showing us, and we use these points of reference to flesh out how we imagine the game's world to be.

Now, I can totally imagine a biggish dilemma regarding the monster class portraits... Because you either create gender characteristics that are totally alien to humans, in which case they might as well be subraces or just depictions of random individual differences; or you try to stick more closely to the human gender characteristics, in which case you kind of risk making them less monstrous. Finding the balance - that is, having just enough human gender characteristics to help us identify which gender the portrait should represent, and then flavoring it with totally alien gender characteristics to tell us something new about the world of DD - must be totally hard.

So I guess from this reasoning it's actually an ingenious gordian solution to try to make them seem asexual, to convey the message that the gender characteristics are imperceptible to us, even though it will most likely end up being instinctively interpreted in a way that each monster race only has a specific gender (and whether these gender assumptions are showing a big spread among the players, or whether there are prevalent assumptions on the gender of each monster race, is not something I can meaningfully assess, though from a confirmation bias point of view I'm sure everyone sees it exactly like I do, i.e. assume masculine for all except Gorgon ).

[berpdreyfuss]