I’ll vote against this with the Masculine rider.

Agree with Josh. The push to take a Forename is fine. The preference towards Masculine has already been rejected before by many players before in other Proposals, so trying to suggest it again seems like a bad idea that will sink an otherwise good Proposal. The question of “do players want to play an historically-accurate Masculine-dominated medieval setting, or do they want a more modern gender-neutral setting regardless of historical accuracy” has already been answered.

If I’m reading the ruleset correctly, the only thing that name-gender does right now is determine whether an Heir can sit on the Tyngwall; feminine-named Heirs can, masculine-named Heirs cannot. There is zero reason to choose a masculine name.

I’d disagree that this change created a preference towards Masculine. It raises the question of whether it’s better to be on the Tyngwall or to possess a minor Claim, and I don’t think the answer is clear cut. I was aiming for a small but interesting decision when choosing a name, rather than the current level of no decision at all.

If we want to continue with a dynasty where all characters have feminine names and vote down any benefits for having a masculine name, that’s fine with me, but we may as well repeal the masculine names list.

Having a feminine name currently seems to benefit exactly none of the people who have one, while this proposal would lead to it becoming a direct victory point deficit, so I’m not sure that I buy that explanation.

Aren’t Cristiana and Hawys both on the Tyngwall? Or do you not see being on the Tyngwall as being any kind of benefit?

Ambiguous whether they are or not - we haven’t established whether the “one” is exclusive or not re traits - and neither have done anything on the Tyngwall to test it. But no, I don’t see being on the Tyngwall as being any kind of benefit at the moment.

(I would like to see it become a benefit at some point, which is another reason why I’d oppose this kind of BAMPAM min-maxing.)

I’ve raised a CfJ to clarify the Trait count, I hadn’t realised we were playing on under ambiguous rules.

per the above

I think a claim with strength 10 doesn’t make masculine names too dominant, especially if tyngwall gets more power in the future (which I might quite possibly propose if no one else does so first)

It feels more BAMPAM to leave feminine as the exclusively best option, since being on the Tyngwall is going to improve in power over time. It’s better to have at least some marginal reason to pick masculine.

@Desertfrg Please do! It’ll be instructive to notice who goes for this and against that when it inevitably fails

I feel like voting for this then dictates how the Tyngwall will be required to become more powerful.

If the Tyngwall does become more powerful, there’s several remedies that could be made available for who controls it and how much power they could wield with it. Because we’re not sure what that will look like yet, preemptively deciding on the balancing rule option is premature.