Why does my Smite Evil ability description say 'her' and not 'him'?

[Kacho]

"A paladin can call out to the powers of good to aid her in her struggle against evil."

"If this target is evil, the paladin adds her Charisma bonus (if any) to her attack rolls and adds her paladin level to all damage rolls made against the target of her smite."

Etc...

I picked the Male gender option and I'm not role-playing an alphabet person. I know it's popular to pander to women these days but this is a bit excessive.

[Detlef]

I don't know why they are doing this.

[Cutlass Jack]

Its not all about you. Or about pandering. The descriptions for classes in the original Pathfinder rule books were written to the gender of whatever 'iconic' character they picked for that class. Pronouns are purely based on the class you pick, not your actual character's gender.

[zero]

lol calling it pandering

[Planeforger]

One of my female characters has a skill tooltip that refers to "his" ability.

By your logic, is the game also excessively pandering to men?

[SayneX]

Originally posted by Kacho:

"A paladin can call out to the powers of good to aid her in her struggle against evil."

"If this target is evil, the paladin adds her Charisma bonus (if any) to her attack rolls and adds her paladin level to all damage rolls made against the target of her smite."

Etc...

I picked the Male gender option and I'm not role-playing an alphabet person. I know it's popular to pander to women these days but this is a bit excessive.

to be honest every class i looked at said the same thing. Her instead of him. Its weird but its whatever these days.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Kacho:

"A paladin can call out to the powers of good to aid her in her struggle against evil."

"If this target is evil, the paladin adds her Charisma bonus (if any) to her attack rolls and adds her paladin level to all damage rolls made against the target of her smite."

Etc...

I picked the Male gender option and I'm not role-playing an alphabet person. I know it's popular to pander to women these days but this is a bit excessive.

It's something pathfinder has always done, as in even the tabletop. It's always been written by progressives and one of the things they did was to word everything defaulting to feminine rather than masculine as most things default to masculine.

It's a little odd, but you get used to it. To be frank it's really no different. Would be cool if they did the descriptions based on the gender of the thing you were clicking on them from, but that's extra work for no real benefit.

Originally posted by zero:

lol calling it pandering

It actually is pandering by definition.

[Pandasaur]

Weird thing to be concerned about dude.

Originally posted by Cutlass Jack:

Its not all about you. Or about pandering. The descriptions for classes in the original Pathfinder rule books were written to the gender of whatever 'iconic' character they picked for that class. Pronouns are purely based on the class you pick, not your actual character's gender.

^^ dude has it right. I remember reading it in the original pathfinder. The switch off because, GASP, women play the game to, so they want to represent men and women. Coding in a tag that reads your chars gender is a lot of random extra work, also.

What's weird is making every description him and assuming everyone who plays/every character is a dude.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Pandasaur:

What's weird is making every description him and assuming everyone who plays/every character is a dude.

That's not actually weird. Objectively it's what you should do. The majority of the general populace is male, and for games, especially games like this the proportion of males to females is far higher so the chances of it being a male reading the description, or being described by the description is higher.

So it's what you should default to if you aren't going to make it neutral (their, they).

[Silhouette]

Originally posted by Kacho:

"A paladin can call out to the powers of good to aid her in her struggle against evil."

"If this target is evil, the paladin adds her Charisma bonus (if any) to her attack rolls and adds her paladin level to all damage rolls made against the target of her smite."

Etc...

I picked the Male gender option and I'm not role-playing an alphabet person. I know it's popular to pander to women these days but this is a bit excessive.

It's not pandering. It's because the iconic Paladin in Pathfinder is a woman: Seelah.

Iconic Characters are a traditional concept in a lot of tabletop games, where they're sort of the example character for their class, often times showing up in other media, such as Amiri, the Iconic Barbarian, who was in Kingmaker. This is also represented in the gendering of each classes' documentation. Paladin's has 'her' in a lot of the descriptive text because of Seelah and so does Barbarian, because of Amiri, whereas say... Wizard, for example, is gendered with 'His' because of the iconic Wizard, Ezren.

The game copies the text from the books and manuals, which utilize this concept, which honestly, I find rather endearing and nice, since it establishes a sort of tradition and prestige for the game and it just feels nice to hearken back to the original iconics. It's kind of like an acknowledgement of the 'first' Paladin, with first quoted because I'm not sure it's actually the first, but it feels like that. You're using the class that represented Seelah and/or the one she pioneered.

I'm not a fan of pandering, either, but this really isn't that. It's more of a continued, honored tradition in tabletop. It's present in older editions of D&D, too, although I don't remember if 5e got rid of it with the big changes they've been making. Go and check the other classes versus their iconic characters. Every single one does. I'll wait. =)

[Dex]

i'm pretty sure they use different pronouns for different classes, so wizard might be "he" and paladin "she". don't think too much about it.

[PAPI_BIGDADDY]

bad take.

http://www.pathfindercommunity.net/iconic-characters

[Mork]

The Pathfinder creator Paizo use iconic characters to describe and represent their classes. The iconic paladin is Seelah, so the ''her'' in the description is actually Seelah and not your main character.

Amiri from kingmaker is the iconic barbarian. Barbarian descriptions should also say ''her''.

http://www.pathfindercommunity.net/iconic-characters

[Enemyz]

Why not just code it to say the correct pronoun. How hard is this....otherwise yea it just looks like pandering.

[Red]

I love people who always go "How hard can it be?" Do it and find out, then.

[Shotagonist]

If female pronouns offend you, play another game snowflake