Your link proves absolutely nothing.
You: “D&D doesn’t refer to female witches as Warlocks”
Me: Provides link to 5th Edition D&D materials clearly showing a class called Warlock in D&D, and that classes in D&D are not gender locked.
You: “That link proves nothing.”
Me: smh
While I agree with you that language changes as & when people use words differently, your entire argument appears to be “but D&D does it”. I hate to break it to you, but D&D (& even WoW) are fairly niche, even as far as games go. They aren’t some massive arbiters of language.
If you ask the average person on the street, they’d assume it was refering to a male person.
2 Likes
Having a choice in a game to choose between “male or female” for a warlock does not mean that warlock is gender neutral. It means whomever made the game decided to chose between witch or warlock and accept the fact that roughly 50% of the choices wouldn’t be gender accurate.
This game however doesn’t have that problem. Th Warlock is a female. LOCKED. So my question is… why Warlock?
And if you insist that “Warlock” is gender neutral please link proof. I’ve looked. I’ve linked. Show me. Its not. The very meaning of the word is “male witch”.
Would you create a class, gender lock it male then call it Sorceress? No I don’t think you would.
1 Like
First of all, this game cannot exist without D&D. D&D invented the fantasy RPG. All RPGs, pen&paper or electronic, only exist because D&D does.
Second, the average person on the street probably can’t spell Warlock much less tell you what it means. There aren’t many uses of ‘Warlock’ in the public domain outside of fantasy novels.
Third, word evolution exists, whether you agree with it or not. Just go browse Urban Dictionary for a while to make your head explode. WoW is 17 years old. D&D was created in 1974 (~48 years ago). That’s more then enough time for the usage to adopt new meaning.
Warlock is a common “mastery” or “class” in video games and isn’t always gender specific in those cases. It is not unheard of to use the “masculine” counterpart to encompass a fantasy for male or female, it happens quite frequently. Games I can think of off the top of my head: World of Warcraft, Rift, Grim Dawn; “Warlock” is still warlock regardless how you make your character. I think calling the term gender-neutral in these cases is correct.
1 Like
Right, but you are talking about games that offer gender choices.
Show me a game that has a male gender locked Sorceress.
Show me a game (besides LE) that has a female gender locked “warlock”.
If I had the choice to play a male warlock that would make sense.
Yes, and like we have mentioned in the past adding gender options is something that isn’t unheard of in the future. It’s just something we couldn’t realistically do before 1.0.
3 Likes
Please don’t mistake this as a plea for unlocking genders. I’m just baffled at the choice to…
- lock the acolyte as female
then
- Give her a mastery called “warlock”.
Would you lock a magic class as male then offer a mastery called Scorceress?
1 Like
You are wrong. It says as much in the definition YOU posted. Warlock being tied to a gender didn’t start until the Scots did it. What was it before that? As has been mentioned, there are many examples where the Scots gendered use is not what is being used.
LE could just be going with the “breaker of oaths” or “deceiver” usage of the word.
When they say can be male or female they are referring to “witch” not warlock.
“A warlock is a male practitioner of witchcraft. The most commonly accepted etymology derives warlock from the Old English ƿǣrloga, which meant “breaker of oaths” or “deceiver” and was given special application to the devil around 1000. In early modern Scots, the word came to be used as the male equivalent of witch (which can be male or female, but has historically been used predominantly for females).”
As a non native speaker Warlock as a female doesn’t sound wrong. I often played my warlock in WoW as a female character.
And i do like “Warlock” it’s kinda stylish. Whereas “Hex” doesn’t sound fancy enough.
Right… thats because you had a gender choice, and they had to chose a class (one class). Choosing the class name “Witch” would have been female, “Warlock” male.
The only way to avoid this conundrum was would have been to find a more gender neutral term… they went with Warlock. So roughly 50% of the time it was correct.
Wow giving gender choices on a gender specific class doesn’t remove the meaning of a word.
The situation here is odd because… 1) the gender is locked, and the chose the opposite gendered name.
I don’t know how many times I got to explain this.
To save development time in the future!
All jokes aside, I wouldn’t overthink it. I wasn’t working at EHG when the mastery class names were discussed but we could have picked Warlock because it sounded cooler than Witch. I know you wouldn’t want that answer.
1 Like
That’s exactly the kind of answer I want.
You’ll agree? (That the character is a gender locked female) right?
You’ll agree that there is a name for a woman who performs witchcraft right?
You’ll agree that there is a name for a man who performs witchcraft right?
So its not like EHG didn’t have a choice. They did.
That’s all…I’ve said my peace.
1 Like
They should rename it to Warloque.
1 Like
Or any other random combination of letters?
Not gonna lie, I’m a little disappointed that Kissing didn’t tell us to chill the #### out.
Make some guesses, I’ll judge if it sounds cool (and female).
I think the passion in this discussion fascinating.^^ To add my 5 cents, if you look up the words in an English dictionary such as Oxford or Cambridge, they clearly refer to warlock as male and witch as female. Hence, you need to understand the confusion among some people. There is a reason why the book / game /series do not refer to Geralt - the witch of Riva…
That said, clearly the English dictionary does not prevent more lose applications of the expressions, so whatever^^
1 Like
For me its the fact that because of the gender lock… it should have been an easy choice.
Imagine if they called the male gender locked sorcerer a sorceress.
Then you’ll understand where I"m coming from.
1 Like