After starting my topic on a more moderate and diplomatic Archmagister for House Telvanni, Gaius Atrius has convinced me that this mod would be a good place to work on my CS skills before tackling the more in-depth Telvanni mod. Basically it always irked me that my female protagonist was Patriarch, Archmagister, Brother, and other masculine titles for faction rank. My goal is to make a mod where the PC's gender is reflected in the faction titles.

To me, Dunmer society is likely male-dominated and therefore the masculine titles make sense. For example, Hatshepsut took the title Pharaoh, not Queen, and there are western examples like Irene of Athens (Byzantine monarch who took the title "emperor" rather than "empress") and Jadwiga of Poland (who took the title "king" rather than "queen"). That's just my opinion, though.

Go for it! I don't think there's anything against it lorewise, and even if it were, well :hubbahubba:
I also like your ideas on the archmagis/ter/tra, being a free spirit doesn't mean you have to suppress or destroy anyone.

to zaarin: what the f*** is western about athens or poland?
I myself am a bit west of either but still not in the west. sorry. and why women use male titles... well, that's a long story.

please excuse me for going off topic, I am just starting to post and I love you all.

the problem with this, implementation wise, is that anything that calls for %rank could easily miss speak. Changing the names is relatively easy, but then you would have to hunt down this command in dialog where ever it is incorrect and alter it. Imagine Gothren calling himself "archmagistrix"... funny, but rather frightening also.

If you only change the higher ranking names, you would only have to worry about a handful of changes(and a LGNPC patch, for those cases where they use %rank), but if you change everything down to the lowliest spear(wo)man, you may have a large bit of work on your hands.

Generally, Europe (even Eastern Europe) is considered "the West" along with the Levant (Israel, Lebanon), as opposed to "the East" (Asia and Africa).

I'm not looking to make this a large project. I already have an idea for a Temple quest chain should my political Telvanni overlord mod work out. If it is going to be a long project in and of itself I think I'd rather concentrate on my Telvanni mod for the time being. Would it be possible to make, as an example, the Ashlander faction as is and then an Ashlander_Female faction which is identical to the Ashlanders but has female ranks? Then a global script to tell the game to use default for males and the new _Female faction for women?

Potentially, yes. However this will inherit more work than the above as a variety of dialog topics have a filter for PC faction, which would be changed with that. Thus requiring the duplication of all responses with that filter type.

Don't let me discourage you, I suggest you rename the faction heads for females(maybe the upper 2 or 3 ranks), then edit the venella dialog for only those high ranking officials. Then the plugin could be loaded with only female PC and disabled for males. It wouldn't take to terribly long really, and I think it has it's value. It'll also serve to introduce the basics of dialog for you. Depending on how many factions need this change, it could take from 20 minutes to 2 hours. not terribly taxing compared to the time required for quest mods.

Yeah, I only want to tackle this if it will be short and sweet, just a few hours or days at most. Maybe to reduce legwork I could adjust the default factions to female since this would be a mod for female protagonists anyway and then make the factions reversed from what I said before, e.g. Ashalander (with female rank names) and then Ashlander_Male?

I don't think it's a big deal. A lot of military or paramilitary forces around the world address female officers as "sir" even though it's not gender correct. It's a title that stems out of tradition. I think that explanation could also be applied to MW.

Good luck with this. I remember bringing up the issue of gender-specific titles back in 2002 and, boy, did that idea ever stir up a hornets nest. I've never brought it up again. I'm glad to see someone is thinking about making this change.

The LGNPC Redoran mods have alternative faction titles for female players, but they do this by going through and adding new lines of dialogue (filtered by PCsix) for every instance where the PC is addressed by rank. Quite a lot of work, in other words. It might be easier just to come up with new titles that are gender-neutral.

Zaarin, I'm puzzled as to why you think Dunmer society is male-dominated. It's true that most people in the very highest ranks (e.g. heads of Great Houses) are male, but other than that it seems very much equal - more so than ours, in fact. I think this is a great idea for a mod; it's just the implementation that's the problem.

I believe your approach of altering the official faction ranks and specifying that your mod is to be used only if the player is female is the best and most-readily implemented approach to this problem. It is still not without issues since not all dialog entries will use the text define %PCRank but spell out the faction rank instead. Certainly I have observed some LGNPC entries that do this (I regularly change them to %PCRank when I encounter them). There may be instances of official dialog entries that make the same 'error'. Performing a text search would help you find those cases. Copying the entry and then editing the copy (above the official entry) for %PCRank would solve that problem.

In the case of the Redoran Archmaster, LGNPC Pax Redoran has created duplicate entries of dialog that reference this rank, changed %PCRank to Archmistress and filtered it for female players. Not all instances had been address, only notable encounters. The average Redoran on the street will still address female heads of the House as %PCRank (Archmaster). Likewise other LGNPC mods do not make this adjustment. Personally I did not think it worth the trouble, but this was Ostar's wishes inspired I suspect by Aeronwen's http://morningstarlady.livejournal.com/ in which she reports NPCs addressing her as Archmistress.

There is one serious downside to the approach of altering the faction ranks. Any dialog that uses the text define %Rank will refer to that NPC's rank as 'female' regardless of the character's gender. Archmistress Venim - now that sends a chill up my spine.

It is interesting that this discussion should be going on at this time. Ostar and I have been discussing a new Redoran quest. I was sketching dialog away from my computer and mistakenly used the Redoran rank 'Councilor' rather than the official 'Councilman'. I liked the former because it is not gender specific but also because it does not require Dunmer (elves in general) to use the '-man' suffix rather than the '-mer' suffix. I do not like that contradiction, but no more do I like going against Bethesda conventions. We settled that 'Councilor' could be used as a title, but any reference to the NPC's rank should remain 'Councilman" (%Rank). Perhaps you might settle on non-gender specific titles for your project to avoid the contradiction with male NPCs wearing the 'female' rank.

This spells out the issue more clearly than I had realized last night. I'm with you on the lore issue. Also, I wasn't really looking for a long term project in this mod. I was hoping for a simple mod that would let me do something functional while I learn the ropes of modding. I think my Telvanni mod will take priority, then. After that's done I'll either return to this mod or move along to my Temple mod before considering if I want to tackle this one. Both of my other mod ideas are cooler and more bang for the buck so to speak.

@Helena: Various pieces of lore (can't cite them ATM; I've been out of the game for a little while) seem to hint that way. I agree that Dunmer society is more equal than ours, but on the other hand I don't think ours is very equal. I think this was also done for the obvious reason of accommodating female players: imagine if your female character were treated as if she were a member of a medieval semi-Asiatic society. I don't think the mod idea is bad, per se, I merely see it as unnecessary; if others think they want it, go for it.