Dear fellow prisoners of the mists,
As many of you know, there have been a lot of questions raised recently about where the team stands in regards to which gender phenotype/model you are allowed to use for your characters. A lot of the community concern stemmed from a concrete case where a player was told that they could not pick a certain gender model for their character. But this soon resulted in a more principal debate on sex, gender and gender identity.
Now for the concrete case, such are always handled by the DM team. That's their prerogative, that's what they do, and if you have issues with how they do it, then you can bring it up with the CC and/or the head DM team. Solving these issues takes time and there’s often a lot more aspects to the cases than might be immediately apparent.
But what I think you are all actually mainly interested in is the principle - again, can you roleplay using another gender phenotype than your character’s biological gender. And the answer to that is (and has always been) a resounding YES.
What we ask is just that you pick the gender phenotype (along with head model, hair and skin color etc.) that most closely represents how you envision the outward appearance of your character. And then roleplay the character as having this outward appearance (with room for details to be defined by a description etc).
Now we understand why you have been impatient for an answer and we apologize for not communicating this out sooner or clearer. We are definitely not without fault. But rest assured (and we hope the various leaked discussions give that away) it’s not because we are ignorant, malignant or indifferent. It’s just part of a larger discussion that we are still trying to find the best solutions to. And it is a topic we find very important, so we want to get it right. Unfortunately, the longer debate ended up getting in the way of delivering the shorter, perhaps more important answer: that we highly appreciate and support our many LGBTQ+ players - and yes, you are very welcome to roleplay your characters as being anywhere on that spectrum too.
Warm regards,
The development team
