Males & Females with different stats?

[Sitri]

http://i68.tinypic.com/53s2vq.jpg

[Donnadogsoth]

Women are actively pushed away from STEM fields starting in early childhood. Even legos are pretty much exclusively marketed to boys now.

Well, genius finds a way. If someone were really deeply interested in Engineering for example, they would have to be pretty brow-beaten to be stopped by casual parental discouragement. My sisters and I had access to Lego as kids and they expressed no interest in it. They were never brow-beaten away from it, and there weren't any television commercials shouting "BOYS ONLY!" They liked Tinker Toys instead.

I don't understand the statement "legos are pretty much exclusively marketed to boys now." A visit to the lego.com store shows a glorious plethora of different types of lego, including architecture, city, star wars, jurassic world, superhero, lord of the rings, and what have you. What makes it too boyish to be accepted by girls? Don't girls like dinosaurs and architecture and superheroes? Well if they don't, the Lego company has produced lines of "girlish" lego like friends, disney princess, and elves? Are they too girlish? What is the Lego company supposed to do? Are too many of the figures male? There aren't that many bearded ones from what I can tell, why can't girls who must play with girl figures pretend the boy figures are girls? Or why can't they buy some girl figures separately--or even lobby the Lego company to include 50/50 sex ratios of figures with every set? I don't get it.

[Feddlefew]

http://i68.tinypic.com/53s2vq.jpg

Mr. and Mrs. Blue Footed Boobie would like to have a word with you:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Blue-footed_Booby_Comparison.jpg

[Sitri]

http://i66.tinypic.com/244ns6h.jpg

[Frozen_Feet]

Proof of psychological difference between man and women is rare and rather difficult to obtain.

This is one of those stupid generalizations.

Some psychological differences are both easy and well researched. Psychoactive effects of testosterone are an example, and largely explains higher risk-taking by men. On the other side, post-birth-giving depression and PMS are female only for obvious reasons.

There are scores of stereotypical beliefs of sex and gender which have no scientific proof for them or which have been proven faulty, that's true. But the prevalence and persistence of such beliefs is not due to lack of quality or quantity of research, nevermind difficulty of it. Rather, it's the opposite: the wall of data is so big no single person can memorize it, and it can take decades before the conclusions trickle to and cement themselves in the public consciousness.

Let's take another stereotype as an example: flu makes men into whiny princesses. Is this belief a myth or reflection if truth? And if the latter, is it caused by social roles or something else?

Think carefully before you continue reading.

I didn't hear this stereotype untill my adult life and regarded it with incredulity. Last week, I found out this has actually been researched as I read the research blurb from Tiede and half-dozen other newspapers. Turns out that flu is worse to men. Women are shielded by higher level of estrogen which inhibits spread of the virus.

[Sitri]

While the pictures are meant to be satirical, I can speak directly to the whole STEM push against women as being absolutely false.

As a former Physics/Bio teacher, I heard a lot of rhetoric about how we were supposed to specifically be making the sciences attractive to the females. Also when I got my masters degree one of the statistics from a textbook stated that given current trends, women would overwhelm men in higher degree science programs in (small number of years that I can't remember.)

I can understand that people are done wrong and people struggle for a number of reasons and many of those reasons can be unjust. As decent people one of our goals should be minimize suffering of others. However, I believe understanding truths about the world is also another goal that people should seek. Trying to get everyone to pretend different things are identical is, in my opinion, misguided and ultimately impossible.

[GrayGriffin]

I really like how your argument is supported entirely by one statistic you read in one book. Also, please consider this: when women start dominating in a field, that field becomes devalued due to being "women's work." So just saying "oh, there are more women in this field, therefore sexism doesn't exist" is ****ING RIDICULOUS.

@Steampunkette: I agree that this thread should be locked. Not even talking about the sexism, but the main topic has been derailed multiple times anyways.

[Sitri]

I really like how your argument is supported entirely by one statistic you read in one book. Also, please consider this: when women start dominating in a field, that field becomes devalued due to being "women's work." So just saying "oh, there are more women in this field, therefore sexism doesn't exist" is ****ING RIDICULOUS.

@Steampunkette: I agree that this thread should be locked. Not even talking about the sexism, but the main topic has been derailed multiple times anyways.

Well my main point was that I saw it in action for several years as a teacher.

As far as one statistic in one book, it was a graduate level text book that was stressing the importance equality in the fields of science; I haven't seen any reason to doubt it.

I am sorry I don't feel like finding the name of it for you, I have been laid up on painkillers for several days after surgery and that is a bit more effort than I care to put in. Here was some other stats that I found rather quickly: http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachelors-degrees-women-usa.pngAccording to data here, women have almost across the board gained ground vs men in degrees, earning more total degrees than men. Science and Math seems very strong for women, but agreed that the other half of STEM seems lacking. I think the reasons for that could be debated at length. RPGs would be low on my list for credible arguments as to why we see this.

Assuming your whole paragraph was directed at me, I am certain you are assigning some words to me that I did not say.

[Mr Beer]

You don't have a weaponized horse you could just get a photo of?

I did, yes.

Well played sir, well played.

[Mr Beer]

Can we start strict locking these threads when they're made?

It's sexist ideology masquerading as good faith arguments that invariably result in the statement that you could apply sexist limits to female characters, with the addendum that male characters could also be limited on a sexist basis though it's never the subject line of the threads which are often as not straight up str penalty questions , it wouldn't make things any more fun and would limit character concepts and options for essentially no value other than to say it's done.

Maybe next time the thread title will be "Should Male Characters Have Lower Con/Int/Wis Mods?"

But I doubt it.

Yeah, mere discussion of whether a factual difference between men and women should ever be modelled in game terms should be stifled at birth.

[ImNotTrevor]

Yeah, mere discussion of whether a factual difference between men and women should ever be modelled in game terms should be stifled at birth.

Hey, you thought-militia bastard! How dare you try stifle her ability to stifle this discussion!

Don't you know that her free speech as a sensitive woman aware of her priviledge absolutely trumps any free speech rights given to white cisgendered male pigs?

[/Sarcasm]

[goto124]

Since the fluff doesn't need mechanics to support everything it defines, mechanics-enforced sexism is just sitting here being sexist.

In a setting, female wood elves are trained to be warriors, while male wood elves are trained to be druids.

Thus, female wood elves spend 3 points on weapon proficiencies, while male wood elves spend 5 points on weapon proficiencies.

Meanwhile, male wood elves spend 3 points on druid spells, while female wood elves spend 5 points on druid spells.

An example that's already brought up before.

[Straybow]

Do you have any ****ing idea just how awful not being able to make any friends for two years is, all just because you won't change your hobbies? And then finding out in high school that there were other girls who liked the same things you did, but wouldn't talk about them because they weren't supposed to like them? Yeah, HS sucks. You hope you can get over it out in the "real world." Then you realize that the same kinds of people who made HS suck grew up and are out in the "real world" just as you are. Some act like they're still in HS.

I suppose if you want the fantasy that there are no differences you can't pretend there aren't any. But then it doesn't matter which option you choose, so why not just eliminate sexual identity altogether? That's the best way to be gender-neutral.

[Feddlefew]

Yeah, HS sucks. You hope you can get over it out in the "real world." Then you realize that the same kinds of people who made HS suck grew up and are out in the "real world" just as you are. Some act like they're still in HS.

I suppose if you want the fantasy that there are no differences you can't pretend there aren't any. But then it doesn't matter which option you choose, so why not just eliminate sexual identity altogether? That's the best way to be gender-neutral.

So, since I wouldn't bend down into an unrealistic and highly constraining role, giving up my sole passion and joy in life until I hit highschool and classmates and I collectively realized it was a lode of BS, I'm delusional and living in a fantasy?

Edit: Most of the people who made my life hell in middle school are currently between the ages of 50-70, and hopefully they will all retire from the school system sooner rather than later.

[Sitri]

So, since I wouldn't bend down into an unrealistic and highly constraining role, giving up my sole passion and joy in life until I hit highschool and classmates and I collectively realized it was a lode of BS, I'm delusional and living in a fantasy?

Edit: Most of the people who made my life hell in middle school are currently between the ages of 50-70, and hopefully they will all retire from the school system sooner rather than later.

When you are young an abnormally large number of people care about what you do when they aren't really affected. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometime it is a bad thing.

I don't know your specific circumstances, so I can't speak to them directly. But I can say that I have had feelings of being expected to pretend BS was true many times in my life that I didn't agree with.

Many times I wouldn't go along, it made my life harder and sometimes it lead to me leaving old lives behind all together. Taking a stand for your morals is rarely easy.

Other times I feel that it isn't worth spinning my wheels. An example being, I now live in an area where atheism is simply not acceptable in public. I could go around trying to convince everyone that they are living life wrong, having badwrongfun, and making laws because of their beliefs that really screw me over. In my opinion, the the last concern is the only reason I should bother, but I have accepted that it isn't worth my time either way. I wish everyone thought like I did in this regard and I didn't have to conform, but I will not see it in my lifetime.

I am not telling you what you should or shouldn't do. As I said at the start, I am far too detached from your life to make that decision. But everyone I know have been forced into roles they don't like in their life. I am saying, gauge the importance of your feelings, your potential gains and loses, and the feelings of others when making these decisions, and don't misplace your feelings.

I don't know why your teachers told you whatever they did to give you these feelings. But I do know that the students I had conflict with viewed the class through a very tiny lens. Many decisions that are best for the group are not best for an individual; constantly teachers are faced with the decision of "Who gets priority?" And many times people are required to be treated different either by law or best outcome for the class in a teaching environment. Many times I could not explain these factors to students even if I wanted to.

For what it is worth, I wish you the best.

[Feddlefew]

We'll say that in middle school most of the resources for students with learning disabilities went to boys because the director of that program were a sexist *** and leave it at that.

In a related story, I did the equivalent of 2 1/2 years of math my freshman year of high school. Not fun, but I took and passed [grueling state math exam discontinued for infamously bad pass/fail rate] on my first go.

[Ifni]

Well, genius finds a way. If someone were really deeply interested in Engineering for example, they would have to be pretty brow-beaten to be stopped by casual parental discouragement. My sisters and I had access to Lego as kids and they expressed no interest in it. They were never brow-beaten away from it, and there weren't any television commercials shouting "BOYS ONLY!" They liked Tinker Toys instead.

I've told this story a couple of times on these forums, and don't feel like typing it out again, but as a fairly successful theoretical physicist who has actually been through the discouragement gauntlet in question (not from parents in my case, but from various other authority figures, as well as quite a bit of peer bullying)... I think that, with regard to my own field, that discouragement is probably pretty effective at getting smart women to go "Screw it, I have plenty of other options in life, I don't have to put up with this", unless they're really obsessed with physics/math. Thus, I don't think you can look at the numbers in a given STEM field and interpret them as a representation of ability, since women are being selected not just on ability but also on obsession to the point where you're willing to ignore a ton of advice and social pressures.

(Likewise, I don't think that the overrepresentation of women in biology reflects men being intrinsically bad at biology.)

I was one of the "really obsessed" ones - "physics/math nerd" appears to be a bigger part of my self-identification than my gender identity (my reaction to "people are punishing you because you're a girl and good at math" was "attempt to be perceived as a boy", rather than "attempt to be perceived as not-good-at-math"). But my sister, for example, scored in the top 0.3% of the state in math at the end of high school*. She's qualified for a math-heavy job. But she has absolutely no interest in going into a mathematical field, and I suspect a big chunk of it is that she spent years of her childhood being mocked and made to feel stupid whenever she tried to learn more about math.

*Funny story there - two years earlier she'd been getting C's in math. When she went to ask her teacher for help on a topic she was having trouble with, the response was along the lines of "Don't worry if you don't understand it, sweetie, we don't expect you to". This was pretty effective at making her extremely self-conscious about asking for help. My mother and I finally managed to persuade her to switch schools for the last two years of high school, and then... yeah. From C student to top 0.3%, once her teachers actually started teaching her. So, y'know, scores don't always reflect ability or potential.

Also, heh, Feddlefew, I have also seen the physicist/biologist thing - my thesis advisor's wife is a biology professor.

EDIT: On the topic of the thread... I'd find sex-based differences in capabilities much less jarring and more interesting if they don't follow existing stereotypes. I feel like if you're trying to explore implications of social or physical sex differences, that'll probably be more interesting if you do it with a set of differences that are not "the stereotypes we all grew up with", because that'll force you to think about the consequences rather than cribbing them from real-world history. I also feel like it's a lot less potentially painful if you (a) make the differences about something irrelevant to the real world (e.g. purely social differences in a society totally different to Ye Olde Generic European Patriarchy, or the genders specializing in different kinds of magic, etc) or (b) make it clear that the characters are not actually human, and the differences between genders are not meant to make a statement about real people. Give me hyena-people where the stereotype of a female is a strong aggressive fighter and the stereotype of a male is a gifted artist/priest/mystic; give me elephant-people where most females live in extended family groups their whole lives while most males are lone-wolf wanderers, etc. But when sex-based differences in games just recapitulate the lazy stereotypes of our history, and the justification is "it's more realistic"... eh. I'll pass.

[JoeJ]

Not entirely true. You still wind up discouraging the use of the sex with the lower cap; there are a wider variety of builds available to the sex without the cap, leading to a disproportionate favoring of one sex over the other wrt optimality. It is true that some builds won't care, but you make it so that certain builds will always prefer the uncapped sex, and no builds prefer the capped sex, therefore fewer members of the capped sex will show up in the game as PCs.

That's quite true. I was addressing the mechanical balance between characters, nothing more.

[Feddlefew]

My problem, as mentioned above, wasn't from (most) teachers but from horrifying levels of resource mismanagement.

For instance, I spent two years stuck in the lowest tier of the reading program in elementary school because my handwriting was bad. So I would spend 2-3 minutes reading Poppleton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppleton_%28book_series%29) or whatever else they gave us, verbally answer the questions, and spend the remaining 35 or so minutes reading The Hobbit.

When I finally got tested, I was quickly diagnosed with severe motor dysgraphia, since my handwriting is so bad that the tests they use to measure how bad it is it stop working. It's kind of like having permanent tendinitis combined with abnormally lax wrist muscles.

[Apricot]

(Likewise, I don't think that the overrepresentation of women in biology reflects men being intrinsically bad at biology.)

There are so many jokes to be made here. I mean, they're all sexist against the one or the other, but that doesn't mean it isn't tempting.

[GrayGriffin]

Give me hyena-people where the stereotype of a female is a strong aggressive fighter and the stereotype of a male is a gifted artist/priest/mystic.

Have you read the webcomic Digger?

Also, I thought of a game that has a kind of interesting look on this: Rookfield, which has "gender" as an important part of your character that has a distinct mechanical effect-but there are six genders, and you can change yours at certain milestones.

[Talakeal]

My problem, as mentioned above, wasn't from (most) teachers but from horrifying levels of resource mismanagement.

For instance, I spent two years stuck in the lowest tier of the reading program in elementary school because my handwriting was bad. So I would spend 2-3 minutes reading Poppleton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppleton_%28book_series%29) or whatever else they gave us, verbally answer the questions, and spend the remaining 35 or so minutes reading The Hobbit.

When I finally got tested, I was quickly diagnosed with severe motor dysgraphia, since my handwriting is so bad that the tests they use to measure how bad it is it stop working. It's kind of like having permanent tendinitis combined with abnormally lax wrist muscles.

Boy do I know what that was like.

[Cazero]

In a setting, female wood elves are trained to be warriors, while male wood elves are trained to be druids.

Thus, female wood elves spend 3 points on weapon proficiencies, while male wood elves spend 5 points on weapon proficiencies.

Meanwhile, male wood elves spend 3 points on druid spells, while female wood elves spend 5 points on druid spells.

An example that's already brought up before.

You mean Warcraft? In World of Warcraft there are male fighters and female druids among the Night Elves. For some reason, we all assumed from Warcraft 3 that those don't exist despite the Demon Hunter, a clearly fighter-y and not druidic figure, being a male all along !

But ignoring the example to speak about the point : this looks like a setting specific wonky class-like restriction in a point buy system. A fluff issue that spawned some mechanics dichotomy for some reason. I ask : what for? Warning them that male fighters and female druids will be frowned upon by the rest of society, or disallowing them altogether for "never having the opportunity to get training 'cause that society enforces gender roles" seems to be a better idea than artificially crippling the mechanics of a concept.
The example of L5R battle maiden was already brought up : if a man get that training, he better never grow a beard and keep fake boobs his entire life because when his own clan find out, he's dead. Isn't that penalizing enough?

[OldTrees1]

If the variance inside each group is larger than the variance between the groups, then one should model it with choices rather than by limiting either group.

For example:
There might be variance between Women and Men with respect to Intellect. However the variance with respect to Intellect within each group is much larger. Applying bonuses/penalties to one group might be able to model any variance between the groups, but at the cost of being unable to model the larger variance inside each group.

So no, humans should not have different racial modifiers between their subgroups.

[AMFV]

If the variance inside each group is larger than the variance between the groups, then one should model it with choices rather than by limiting either group.

For example:
There might be variance between Women and Men with respect to Intellect. However the variance with respect to Intellect within each group is much larger. Applying bonuses/penalties to one group might be able to model any variance between the groups, but at the cost of being unable to model the larger variance inside each group.

So no, humans should not have different racial modifiers between their subgroups.

This doesn't hold true for strength or athletic ability in general though. I mean if you take the most fit and athletic woman (Olympic level) and have her compete with fairly average High School aged males, she'll lose 5 times out of 6. This has been demonstrated numerous times.

I mean, I'm not really one to introduce these kind of restrictions, after all the badass chick is a fantasy trope, and a science fiction trope. So I think it doesn't really add too much to remove them. But I could see how they could be disturbing to somebody's sense of verisimilitude, since the real world difference is so pronounced. I mean if hyper realism is what you're going for (and there are certainly games where that is the primary and chief objective of the designers), then that should be taken into account. After all somebody might actually want to play "Hovels and Huts", I certainly wouldn't mind a super-realistic war RPG, which could be really dramatic and interesting.

What does surprise me, is that so many people are arguing so vehemently against something which is easily demonstrable. All issues of gendering aside, there are clear demonstrable physical differences between male and female (sexed) humans. It might be possible to have those not factor in, in a setting where magic or science overcomes them (as it practically does in our current modern life). But they are there. Biological sex is a fact, it might be possible to alter that, or change aspects of it, but that doesn't mean that the difference isn't present. Humans (unlike the birds shared earlier) have a pretty distinct amount of physical sexual dimorphism, enough to identify the biological sex of a person with only bits of skeleton left (depending on which bits, of course). And then on top of that you have clear hormonal differences, there is again, a reason that Testosterone is used as a performance enhancing drug, because it works to that effect, and human males with only natural resources VASTLY exceed what human females produce in that regard (as much as ten times the amount), that's a greater disparity than you would see even between a juicing athlete and one who wasn't. You can see the difference in muscle capacity displayed fairly clearly if you look at bodybuilding. In female bodybuilding (not physique, not fitness, not bikini, the class where women are supposed to build as much muscle as they can) the amateur female Superheavyweight class starts at 140 lbs, which means that a female at 3-6% body fat will not weigh much more than, even given chemical assistance. However, the male Superheavyweight class starts at 225.25, that's a difference of around eighty-five pounds, that's a huge potential difference between the genders in terms of muscle mass.

I'm not opposed to having the monster Hyena race either, or the monstrous spider race. But if we're arguing that human males don't have an advantage in terms of sheer physical ability (which is pretty nearly worthless in most of the things required by modern society, yes, it's nice when you move, but it's like being the guy with the truck, other people ask you to move), that's simply not borne out by the mountain of available evidence on the subject. Again, I don't model those things in my games, because it violates the tropes, and I don't think it adds that much, but my games aren't intended to be super realistic, but rather cinematic and literary. If a person were designing a super realistic game, this would most likely be something they would want to factor in.

[Feddlefew]

I will, once again, restate that if we give male characters higher STR because it's realistic, we should give women higher CON or equivalent.

[AMFV]

I will, once again, restate that if we give male characters higher STR because it's realistic, we should give women higher CON or equivalent.

But if we're going for hyper-realism, that would be inaccurate. A realistic world is not balanced. Female humans tend to be not as good as males at physical tasks. That includes endurance tasks like marching, carrying heavy weight over distance, enduring pain (at least in the studies I've read, although this one is thorny and contentious so I wouldn't put too much stock in that). In a realistic world, men have physical advantages, they wind up having other disadvantages but not really ones that would affect adventurers (unless they're very old, at which point, men's physical advantages tend to come back to haunt them).

About the only thing you could give women physically is a slight advantage in terms of flexibility. Even if we're accounting for bodyweight stuff, males tend to have an advantage, I mean look at male gymnasts and compare them to female gymnasts, you the same disparity (although the flexibility disparity is much more readily apparent there than it is otherwise).

If we're using realism as our design concept, we can't say "well we need to add this unrealistic thing to make it balanced." We need to go all-in. Otherwise the concept doesn't work. And acknowledging the existence of real physical limitations is a thing. For example I am a VERY serious lifter. But I will never be as strong as Brian Shaw, just because of my frame. I can get as strong as I can, but he will still have an advantage in terms of weight and size. The same thing is true of other things, real life isn't fair nor is it balanced. There are people who have PhDs in Chemistry, Black Belts in multiple Martial Arts, nearly perfect musculature, tall height, and who are successful Hollywood stars (well a person). Real life isn't about balance, if you're going for true realism, then balance goes out the window.

Edit: Also regarding endurance, it's worth noting that Testosterone also increases red blood cell count, which creates a significant advantage in terms of endurance, which is why endurance athletes try to get away with using it, and why it's used as a way to treat HIV in certain extreme cases.

[Feddlefew]

The reasons I would give Women CON over Dex are as follows:

1) Women in the real world are better at surviving injuries (http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/surviving_trauma_being_a_woman_confers_advantages) and disease then men, because estrogen speeds healing and increases immune response, while testosterone depresses both. Their higher proportion of subcutaneous fatty tissues also provide a safer form of cushioning than muscle, since muscle is rich in blood vessels (increases the risk of bleeding to death from shallow lacerations and punctures), and the rapid breakdown of damaged muscle tissue releases proteins that destroy organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome)

2) Looking at pure endurance sports such as free diving and long distance swimming, women systematically outperform men. They might not be able to carry as much, but that's a strength thing.

3) Pain sensitivity =/= pain tolerance. Remember, a vital part of human reproduction is that the woman needs to shove another, smaller human through a ring the most sensitive tissue on a human's body and not pass out, even if there's tearing.

4) Everyone expects DEX or CHA, because that plays neatly into stereotypes of women.

[AMFV]

The reasons I would give Women CON over Dex are as follows:

1) Women in the real world are better at surviving injuries (http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/surviving_trauma_being_a_woman_confers_advantages) and disease then men, because estrogen speeds healing and increases immune response, while testosterone depresses both. Their higher proportion of subcutaneous fatty tissues also provide a safer form of cushioning than muscle, since muscle is rich in blood vessels (increases the risk of bleeding to death from shallow lacerations and punctures), and the rapid breakdown of damaged muscle tissue releases proteins that destroy organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome)


Certainly true, and in a game where Con only models physical resilience to injuries I would agree. But the difference is not as drastic as the strength difference, hardly even close. As a result I don't know if it would need a lesser modifier. Again if we're going for realism, balance is not the primary concern, but rather simulation of reality.



2) Looking at pure endurance sports such as free diving and long distance swimming, women systematically outperform men. They might not be able to carry as much, but that's a strength thing.


Women have higher body fat percentage, that's going to make them more bouyant. Swimming isn't a good measure of overall endurance, since there are so many other things that factor into it. Smoothness and hydrodynamics as well is a point that favors women. I don't think that proves anything about overall endurance, since if you take equally sized men and women in other endurance events the trend is reversed.



3) Pain sensitivity =/= pain tolerance. Remember, a vital part of human reproduction is that the woman needs to shove another, smaller human through a ring the most sensitive tissue on a human's body and not pass out, even if there's tearing.


A process for which the human body produces and pumps them full of drugs, hormones, and other things to make that process easier. It's not to say that giving birth isn't painful, but it is to say that a woman in that condition is hardly representative of the pain tolerance of an average woman on an average day. So it wouldn't really fit any simulation.



4) Everyone expects DEX or CHA, because that plays neatly into stereotypes of women.

And here we come to the crux of the matter. If we're looking for realism, bucking stereotypes is not a concern. Flat-out it isn't, and so that shouldn't be a concern of a designer who is working towards that goal.

[8BitNinja]

You said something about childbirth not representing actual pain tolerance because of modern medicine

People have been giving birth before modern medicine

[AMFV]

You said something about childbirth not representing actual pain tolerance because of modern medicine

People have been giving birth before modern medicine

I said something about childbirth not representing actual pain tolerance because the human body alters it's chemical state to be able to tolerate it. It pumps gobs of endorphins into the body to increase that, decreases pain receptors. It has nothing to do with modern medicine.

[Feddlefew]

You said something about childbirth not representing actual pain tolerance because of modern medicine

People have been giving birth before modern medicine

Those hormones also don't do anything for pain; they just make you forget that you were in horrible agony.

That's why epidurals are so popular.

Edit:


I said something about childbirth not representing actual pain tolerance because the human body alters it's chemical state to be able to tolerate it. It pumps gobs of endorphins into the body to increase that, decreases pain receptors. It has nothing to do with modern medicine.

The endophins come afterwards; endorphins make people fall asleep, which would be pretty deadly during childbirth. The hormones secreted during labor actually keep you awake and aware through the worst of it.

There's a reason people scream.

[Leewei]

NPCs can have any ability modifications by gender the DM deems appropriate to the world. PCs are a different matter, entirely. Heroes are the exceptions. They include women such as Boudicca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica), who stood around six feet tall and led men in battle. Let players determine which concept works for them without concern for gender and game balance.

[AMFV]

Those hormones also don't do anything for pain; they just make you forget that you were in horrible agony.

That's why epidurals are so popular.

Edit:



The endophins come afterwards; endorphins make people fall asleep, which would be pretty deadly during childbirth. The hormones secreted during labor actually keep you awake and aware through the worst of it.

There's a reason people scream.

Regardless pain receptors are reduced during that period. I'm not saying that birth isn't uncomfortable, but it is not a normal emotional state or a normal physiological state at all. As such you can't use it to judge female performance under normal conditions. The same way as you can't judge the physical ability of a person when they're on drugs, or in an emotionally vulnerable state. It's too drastic a variation from normal factors. Also hormones making people forget they're in terrible agony certainly counts as pain suppression by any definition I know. That literally means that you are increasing ability to tolerate pain.

[Apricot]

If you want the real female advantage in a hyper-realistic world, it should be that women require far less food. The brief look that I've done pins the numbers at 2000 for women compared to 2500-2800 for men. That's 25% to nearly 50% more food for men. If we're playing in a realistic medieval/dark age setting, food ought to be a major concern, and the advantage of paying only 70-80% of the male costs for food would add up very quickly. One could argue that women need a lot more food while pregnant; this is quite likely true, but totally irrelevant because a woman going on an adventure would probably want to avoid getting pregnant.

It just so happens that most roleplaying games completely ignore food, or else put it as the most minimal cost imaginable. This is understandable: basic bodily maintenance is boring as sin. But if we're talking objectively about the sexes, it's something very important to keep in mind. There is a very distinct biological advantage to being female in this sense, even if it's not something which is easily seen in modern times.

Another way of putting it: why isn't there a strong evolutionary pressure to make all humans super-big and super-burly? Why isn't everyone a Scandinavian behemoth, or one of those seven-foot tribesmen from central (? not certain) Africa? Well, here's the answer. Is it a really satisfying one? Not particularly, but that doesn't mean it isn't the truth.

The real world does, in fact, balance itself very carefully. Unlike in roleplaying games, where underpowered classes stay in source books forever, unsuitable species go extinct. Advantages and disadvantages constantly weigh themselves against one another from generation to generation, and each potential edge gets developed just to the point of it becoming a weakness. If there are differences between men and women, they are there for an excellent reason. The problem is, the real world doesn't balance the sexes in order to let them go on adventures. It balances them to let them use resources optimally to propagate the species. If we want balance for the sake of adventures, we have to do that ourselves, and the cleanest and most elegant way of doing that is to just outright ignore the biological differences. And ya know, there's nothing wrong with that.

[Donnadogsoth]

The reasons I would give Women CON over Dex are as follows:

1) Women in the real world are better at surviving injuries (http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/surviving_trauma_being_a_woman_confers_advantages) and disease then men, because estrogen speeds healing and increases immune response, while testosterone depresses both. Their higher proportion of subcutaneous fatty tissues also provide a safer form of cushioning than muscle, since muscle is rich in blood vessels (increases the risk of bleeding to death from shallow lacerations and punctures), and the rapid breakdown of damaged muscle tissue releases proteins that destroy organs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush_syndrome)

2) Looking at pure endurance sports such as free diving and long distance swimming, women systematically outperform men. They might not be able to carry as much, but that's a strength thing.

3) Pain sensitivity =/= pain tolerance. Remember, a vital part of human reproduction is that the woman needs to shove another, smaller human through a ring the most sensitive tissue on a human's body and not pass out, even if there's tearing.

4) Everyone expects DEX or CHA, because that plays neatly into stereotypes of women.

This is worth considering. Thank you.

[AMFV]

If you want the real female advantage in a hyper-realistic world, it should be that women require far less food. The brief look that I've done pins the numbers at 2000 for women compared to 2500-2800 for men. That's 25% to nearly 50% more food for men. If we're playing in a realistic medieval/dark age setting, food ought to be a major concern, and the advantage of paying only 70-80% of the male costs for food would add up very quickly. One could argue that women need a lot more food while pregnant; this is quite likely true, but totally irrelevant because a woman going on an adventure would probably want to avoid getting pregnant.

This is definitely true, and I believe was mentioned earlier. I think this was one of the things I said should be focused on as a female advantage, although most games don't factor this in. But I imagine any game that's based around realism to the point where women and men's differences actually matter, would probably include basic logistics.



It just so happens that most roleplaying games completely ignore food, or else put it as the most minimal cost imaginable. This is understandable: basic bodily maintenance is boring as sin. But if we're talking objectively about the sexes, it's something very important to keep in mind. There is a very distinct biological advantage to being female in this sense, even if it's not something which is easily seen in modern times.

I agree, although any game that's going to be looking at the minutiae to the degree that they care about gendered physical abilities, is probably going to devote GOBs of time to logistics, and I mean gobs, since that's the most important part of really anything we do,



Another way of putting it: why isn't there a strong evolutionary pressure to make all humans super-big and super-burly? Why isn't everyone a Scandinavian behemoth, or one of those seven-foot tribesmen from central (? not certain) Africa? Well, here's the answer. Is it a really satisfying one? Not particularly, but that doesn't mean it isn't the truth.


But there are Scandinavian behemoths, and super tall tribesmen, we shift to fit our resources rather admirably actually over a few generations.



The real world does, in fact, balance itself very carefully. Unlike in roleplaying games, where underpowered classes stay in source books forever, unsuitable species go extinct. Advantages and disadvantages constantly weigh themselves against one another from generation to generation, and each potential edge gets developed just to the point of it becoming a weakness. If there are differences between men and women, they are there for an excellent reason. The problem is, the real world doesn't balance the sexes in order to let them go on adventures. It balances them to let them use resources optimally to propagate the species. If we want balance for the sake of adventures, we have to do that ourselves, and the cleanest and most elegant way of doing that is to just outright ignore the biological differences. And ya know, there's nothing wrong with that.

The world balances itself with species against species. It doesn't balance things inside the species. There is no reason for men to be as good at the roles that women biologically needed to be good at, or the reverse. So I agree with you completely. I don't think that ignoring biological differences is at all a bad option (it's what I do). But on the other hand, I could see somebody wanting to incorporate imbalanced things, which would create a specific style of game, which could be productive.

[8BitNinja]

If you guys want different starting stats, think of maybe giving STR and CON to males and DEX and CHA to females, two different boosts instead of one

please do not include INT and WIS to this argument, that's when the real fight starts

[The Insanity]

I gave +2 Str, Con and Int to males and +2 Dex, Wis and Cha to females for humans in my games.

[YossarianLives]

I gave +2 Str, Con and Int to males and +2 Dex, Wis and Cha to females for humans in my games.
Oh dear. That has far too much mechanical impact and has some very nasty implications.

[AMFV]

If you guys want different starting stats, think of maybe giving STR and CON to males and DEX and CHA to females, two different boosts instead of one

please do not include INT and WIS to this argument, that's when the real fight starts


Oh dear. That has far too much mechanical impact and has some very nasty implications.


D&D is probably the wrong context to use for this. The stats in D&D are already completely non-realistic. Trying to use them to simulate that level of detail is only going to produce absurd results. For example if Men get a Con bonus, that means they can go without food for longer, which as we've mentioned isn't the case. Giving women a Con bonus, means that they're going to be able to run faster for longer, which we've shown isn't the case. D&D is not a system with the level of realism that would be required for this sort of hyper-realism to be even worth considering.

After all in D&D a 400 lb powerlifter is mechanically very similar to a 120 lb gymnast, even though reality-wise they are completely different. The same stat is used for all of their calculations even though they are absurdly different. Without that level of differentiation, the idea of creating stats for different biological sexes is absurdist, you're just going to wind up with a parody of what's realistic.

Tl;Dr : There are systems where that level of realism works. D&D is absolutely not one of them. As such including stat boosts for different biological sexes in D&D is completely pointless.

[Segev]

If you take the most fit and athletic woman (Olympic level) and have her compete with fairly average High School aged males, she'll lose 5 times out of 6. This has been demonstrated numerous times.

I find this hard to believe. In what events are we comparing the Olympian woman to the average high school boy? I assume "average" to be rather literal, so we're looking at a sophomore or junior, most likely. Not a starting member of any particular sporting event. Almost certainly not of whatever event this Olympian athletess is specialized in.

The average high school male is not a particularly stunning sprinter; a female track-and-field Olympic competitrix is likely going to sprint far better. He isn't a wrestler; a female Olympic wrestler may have a harder time in such a match-up due simply to his mass, but she'll have far greater skill and wiry strength-to-weight ratio with better leverage and knowledge of how to use it. The average high school male might know the basics of swimming, and easily be able to do a lap or two, but a full-on Olympic-scale swimming race will see the woman who's trained for it demonstrate far greater endurance, breath control, and overall speed with her muscles optimized for her size and sport compared to his. (I'll even leave the buoyancy as an even trait; the average high school boy won't have the muscle density of a male professional athlete and may well have...let's be generous and call it 'residual baby fat.')

I'm going to need some pretty specific case studies to back up the quoted claim, as I find it pretty far-fetched. I know I, as a 30-something man who is 6' tall, 250 lbs., and not particularly muscular would lose to a female Olympic athlete in most possible events, especially if it's the one for which she's trained.

[AMFV]

I find this hard to believe. In what events are we comparing the Olympian woman to the average high school boy? I assume "average" to be rather literal, so we're looking at a sophomore or junior, most likely. Not a starting member of any particular sporting event. Almost certainly not of whatever event this Olympian athletess is specialized in.

The average high school male is not a particularly stunning sprinter; a female track-and-field Olympic competitrix is likely going to sprint far better. He isn't a wrestler; a female Olympic wrestler may have a harder time in such a match-up due simply to his mass, but she'll have far greater skill and wiry strength-to-weight ratio with better leverage and knowledge of how to use it. The average high school male might know the basics of swimming, and easily be able to do a lap or two, but a full-on Olympic-scale swimming race will see the woman who's trained for it demonstrate far greater endurance, breath control, and overall speed with her muscles optimized for her size and sport compared to his. (I'll even leave the buoyancy as an even trait; the average high school boy won't have the muscle density of a male professional athlete and may well have...let's be generous and call it 'residual baby fat.')

I'm going to need some pretty specific case studies to back up the quoted claim, as I find it pretty far-fetched. I know I, as a 30-something man who is 6' tall, 250 lbs., and not particularly muscular would lose to a female Olympic athlete in most possible events, especially if it's the one for which she's trained.

I should probably elucidate more. By average I was referring to a male athlete of average ability in that particular sport. I believe that it was in this very thread where somebody linked the description of the Canadian Women's Olympic Hockey team losing to a less than stellar male High School Hockey team (one with a losing record, I believe). So we're not comparing untrained people, but we are comparing the best in the world against people with far less training and far less age. I apologize, I could have been more clear on that. So in this case, average was meant to refer to average athlete not average student.

[8BitNinja]

About the whole Olympic Woman vs. Average High School Boy,

in D&D terms, we are pretty much talking about a first level fighter with 1-2 feats against a 20th level fighter with a plethora of feats

Could it play out like this in real life? Yes. D&D? No.

[AMFV]

About the whole Olympic Woman vs. Average High School Boy,

in D&D terms, we are pretty much talking about a first level fighter with 1-2 feats against a 20th level fighter with a plethora of feats

Could it play out like this in real life? Yes. D&D? No.

You can't model real life with D&D, that's why there's not really a point in discussing stat modifiers for different genders in D&D, because it's not designed for that sort of modelling, you'd need a much more hyper-realistic system. To be fair there isn't a disparity in the world as big as the disparity between level 1 and level 20 in 3.5 era D&D.

[infinitum3d]

Making any broad generalization, whether in regards to race, gender, age, religion, etc, is not reasonable or logical.

I'm 6 foot tall and weight 150 pounds. My strength would be about a 7 in D&D.

This woman (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/08/02/sports/WEIGHTLIFTING2/WEIGHTLIFTING2-superJumbo.jpg), obviously a lot higher than me. Gender has nothing to do with it.

Age may give you more wisdom (MAY, but not always), or even higher charisma based on the newest definition (belief in oneself or confidence or something to that effect), but generally, you cannot blanket statement anything.

In that regard, I typically go against the grain when I create a new character. I want to play a sickly (CON+7) Dwarven Bard (CHA+17) who knows every tale in the last 100 years (INT=18) but can't remember where he left his lute (WIS=9) and prefers water to ale, shaves, is afraid of the dark, and has 2 levels in Wizard.

Or a Female Gnomish Barbarian. Or a Half-Orc Paladin of Sune. Or a Drow follower of Mielikki (wait, that's been done) Or... well, you get my point.

[Clistenes]

If you guys want different starting stats, think of maybe giving STR and CON to males and DEX and CHA to females, two different boosts instead of one

please do not include INT and WIS to this argument, that's when the real fight starts

Man, giving STR and CON to males and giving DEX and CHA to females is just as dangerous: "Ooooh! So men are athletic and tough, while women are cute and bendy! Is that what you mean?!!"

In my head, I hear it with the voice of Katie Monster, just as in the beginning of the "Everybody is a little bit racist" song...

A can of worms, as I said. There is no way to make it satisfactory for everybody.

[Apricot]

Guys I figured it out. Men automatically get Profession(Weightlifter) as a class skill, while women get Profession(Long-distance swimmer). It's perfect. It captures the entirety of the gender experience in all cultures across all possible worlds.

[AMFV]

Guys I figured it out. Men automatically get Profession(Weightlifter) as a class skill, while women get Profession(Long-distance swimmer). It's perfect. It captures the entirety of the gender experience in all cultures across all possible worlds.

I second the motion.

[goto124]

When in doubt, use Professions.

Unless it's Professions (Cooking). Or Proffessions (Driving). Or Professions (Childrearing)

*runs away*

[The Insanity]

Oh dear. That has far too much mechanical impact and has some very nasty implications.
Like what?

[Lorsa]

If you guys want different starting stats, think of maybe giving STR and CON to males and DEX and CHA to females, two different boosts instead of one

please do not include INT and WIS to this argument, that's when the real fight starts

This all depends on the edition of D&D you are using, but assuming 3.5 this doesn't fit the recipe at all. Typically, a physical attribute is worth two mental ones. So this one clearly disadvantages women.

Also, I am assuming we want to keep the total human bonus to +-0, otherwise they're by far the most optimal choice in terms of race (or were you thinking this applies across the board?).

So if you give Str and Con to males, you have to give more than Dex and Cha to females... so you HAVE to include, for example, Wis. In fact, that would make males better fighters and barbarians whereas women would be better clerics/druids/sorcerers/bards. This would make women the more optimal choice (as those classes are better).

[AMFV]

This all depends on the edition of D&D you are using, but assuming 3.5 this doesn't fit the recipe at all. Typically, a physical attribute is worth two mental ones. So this one clearly disadvantages women.

Also, I am assuming we want to keep the total human bonus to +-0, otherwise they're by far the most optimal choice in terms of race (or were you thinking this applies across the board?).

So if you give Str and Con to males, you have to give more than Dex and Cha to females... so you HAVE to include, for example, Wis. In fact, that would make males better fighters and barbarians whereas women would be better clerics/druids/sorcerers/bards. This would make women the more optimal choice (as those classes are better).

Then again, that formula doesn't actually hold true in real play, since mental stats are casting stats and are therefore in almost all cases superior.

But I still hold that D&D is not the right system for this sort of thing. It's not made to handle that level of granularity in stats. The stats are more like guidelines anyways, rather than hard fast rules.

[Lorsa]

Then again, that formula doesn't actually hold true in real play, since mental stats are casting stats and are therefore in almost all cases superior.

Yes, that's true, but I still wanted to point that out.


But I still hold that D&D is not the right system for this sort of thing. It's not made to handle that level of granularity in stats. The stats are more like guidelines anyways, rather than hard fast rules.

I totally agree. Reality is a lot more complex than modeled by D&D, which is fair enough, as we still can't model reality, despite all the hours of research put into it.

[AMFV]

Yes, that's true, but I still wanted to point that out.



I totally agree. Reality is a lot more complex than modeled by D&D, which is fair enough, as we still can't model reality, despite all the hours of research put into it.

The crux of my argument is that D&D is not a system designed enough around simulation to actually make it worthwhile to model the differences between genders. Particularly since the kind of fantasy that D&D depicts has tropes where women are equal fighters to men. In a system that's more gritty, like say, one modelling Game of Thrones, then having female warriors be the exception might be a valid approach. But not so much in D&D

[YossarianLives]

Like what?
That men are more intelligent than women, but that females have 'women's intuition'. I suppose I'm probably reading to much into it, but that's just what jumped out at me immediately.

I apologize, actually. I should have thought through it more before making such an aggressive post.

[Segev]

Clearly, you should have two distinct races: one has males with all the positive stereotypes engrained in their stats, and females with all the negative ones; the other is the reverse with horrid and mechanically pathetic males and glorious and mechanically supreme females. Now you can offend everybody and flatter everybody equally!

[OldTrees1]

Clearly, you should have two distinct races: one has males with all the positive stereotypes engrained in their stats, and females with all the negative ones; the other is the reverse with horrid and mechanically pathetic males and glorious and mechanically supreme females. Now you can offend everybody and flatter everybody equally!

From the aptly flippant response comes a really good solution. Introduce mechanical sexual dimorphism in a new race that does not have such baggage/consequences.

Let's say Lolth wanted to make more accurate Driders:
Male Driders would be Small size with Slight build, *insert worthy ability to balance*, +2Str, +6Dex, +2Con, +2Int, +2Wis, and +2Cha
Female Driders would be Large size with Powerful build, +6Str, +0Dex, +4Con, +2Int, +2Wis, and +2Cha
Add a balancing feature to the Male Driders and then rebalance RHD/LA to tastes/balance.

[SimonMoon6]

Regarding skills, I had considered bonuses like men getting +2 to Intimidate and women getting... some other +2 to some other CHA-based skill, maybe Diplomacy.

This is because (as a general feeling, not anything from any study that I know of) it seems that people tend to fear strange men more often than they do women. Often, this is probably related to the strength issue but also from a "men are more likely to do bad things to you" point of view.

[Segev]

From the aptly flippant response comes a really good solution. Introduce mechanical sexual dimorphism in a new race that does not have such baggage/consequences.

Let's say Lolth wanted to make more accurate Driders:
Male Driders would be Small size with Slight build, *insert worthy ability to balance*, +2Str, +6Dex, +2Con, +2Int, +2Wis, and +2Cha
Female Driders would be Large size with Powerful build, +6Str, +0Dex, +4Con, +2Int, +2Wis, and +2Cha
Add a balancing feature to the Male Driders and then rebalance RHD/LA to tastes/balance.

If you wanted to play out the notion in my admittedly flippant, semi-sarcastic idea, you could go with orcs as the "males get all the good stuff" race and drow as the "females get all the good stuff" race.

Then you really would have a set of races to contrast the good and bad sexual stereotypes (physical, social, etc.) in one setting.

[AMFV]

Regarding skills, I had considered bonuses like men getting +2 to Intimidate and women getting... some other +2 to some other CHA-based skill, maybe Diplomacy.

This is because (as a general feeling, not anything from any study that I know of) it seems that people tend to fear strange men more often than they do women. Often, this is probably related to the strength issue but also from a "men are more likely to do bad things to you" point of view.

Well that depends on culture. There are certainly cultures where women are more feared than men, in certain contexts. You could give circumstance bonuses due to cultural considerations. But I wouldn't input a system wide blanket rule for those kind of things (unless your system is restricted to a small cultural setting).

[OldTrees1]

Regarding skills, I had considered bonuses like men getting +2 to Intimidate and women getting... some other +2 to some other CHA-based skill, maybe Diplomacy.

This is because (as a general feeling, not anything from any study that I know of) it seems that people tend to fear strange men more often than they do women. Often, this is probably related to the strength issue but also from a "men are more likely to do bad things to you" point of view.

Careful of those modifiers. You seem to be describing cultural circumstance modifiers (since it is the target's fear not the feared object's ability to be feared) rather than inherent sexual modifiers.

[Talakeal]

Another problem with the D&D ability score system is a lot more influences it than gender. In real life genetics, both individual and ethnic, play a huge role in physical build, as do the experiances of your early childhood including but not limited to environment, training, nutrition, and injury.

Also, different body types are ideal for different activities, a body which is perfect for running is mot the same as for gymnastics or power lifting. So STR 18 isnt really a thing irl, and Even if it was I doubt there are any normal people who could be described as both str and dex 18 because the required body builds are more or less mutually exclusive.


I suppose if you want the fantasy that there are no differences you can't pretend there aren't any. But then it doesn't matter which option you choose, so why not just eliminate sexual identity altogether? That's the best way to be gender-neutral.

There are still massive cosmetic differences between the sexes.

I think people like to have cosmetic choices be seperate from mechanical ones.

However, I guess we could model a lot of cosmetic things based on "real life". Redheads have lower pain tolerance, people with funny names are socially disadvantaged, big people have bad knees, busty women have bad backs, pale people are likely to get skin cancer, fat people have bad hearts, tall people bump their heads and cant find clothes that fit, short people are weak, long hair caught on things, skinny people starve or freeze to death in the winter, etc. etc. etc.

Hell, and if we look at old timey semi racist pseudo science I am sure we can provide even more penalties based on cosmetic factors. Lets bring back phrenology!





Sarcasm aside, perfectly modelling realism is neither possible nor desired. When I come up with a rule I usually start with a base of "realism" (at least within the game's setting) and then I use the three Fs to see if it is a good idea; fast, fair, and fun. Trying to perfectly model the effects of a characters body type on their abilities is not fast, it would be extremely clunky, and giving people bonuses or penalties based on their cosmetic attributes is neither fair nor fun for most players, so the rule gets tossed until I can find a way to make it satisfy these three criteria.


Also, a few people in this thread seem to be implying that there are many things that women do worse then men to neccesitate a penalty, but nothing they can do better than men to justify a bonus to balance it out. I can find statistics which do show some areas where women outperform men, and a refusal to model them with ingame advantages to balance out their penalties or to even accept they exist does have some sexist implications imo.

[AMFV]

Also, a few people in this thread seem to be implying that there are many things that women do worse then men to neccesitate a penalty, but nothing they can do better than men to justify a bonus to balance it out. I can find statistics which do show some areas where women outperform men, and a refusal to model them with ingame advantages to balance out their penalties or to even accept they exist does have some sexist implications imo.

Well if you could actually provide those statistics, that would be a good start. Literally the only athletic endeavor where you can find women outperforming men is distance swimming, and since women do not typically outperform men at similar endurance events even given similar weight, it's reasonable to assume that has more to do with that one specific thing. (Well technically, I guess gymnastics would count, although the routines that men and women perform are so drastically different as to be nearly incomparable).

Regardless of whether it should be modeled in-game, men have certain physical advantages, which again, are pretty pointless in modern society. But if you're aiming for a super-gritty historical setting, then you'd have to take it into account. I would argue that having those kind of things shouldn't even prevent all cases of female warriors, but rather make them more exceptional. After all there are historical evidence for some impressive ladies. In Pathfinder or 3.5, a female warrior isn't exceptional, in the real world (or a hyper realistic setting) they generally are.

[Talakeal]

Well if you could actually provide those statistics, that would be a good start. Literally the only athletic endeavor where you can find women outperforming men is distance swimming, and since women do not typically outperform men at similar endurance events even given similar weight, it's reasonable to assume that has more to do with that one specific thing. (Well technically, I guess gymnastics would count, although the routines that men and women perform are so drastically different as to be nearly incomparable).

Regardless of whether it should be modeled in-game, men have certain physical advantages, which again, are pretty pointless in modern society. But if you're aiming for a super-gritty historical setting, then you'd have to take it into account. I would argue that having those kind of things shouldn't even prevent all cases of female warriors, but rather make them more exceptional. After all there are historical evidence for some impressive ladies. In Pathfinder or 3.5, a female warrior isn't exceptional, in the real world (or a hyper realistic setting) they generally are.

Why limit it to athletic endeavors?

[AMFV]

Why limit it to athletic endeavors?

Well in this case, because we're discussing actual demonstrable physical things. Which athletic endeavors tends to cover fairly well. I'm open to hearing any other examples. But I can't think of any off the top of my head. Certainly none that have been brought up in this thread. I mean you could include better color vision (women have superior color vision), but that doesn't usually have that much of an impact on actual gameplay. So what exactly is it that you're getting at?

[8BitNinja]

This thread is basically a ticking timebomb now

[Clistenes]

Also, a few people in this thread seem to be implying that there are many things that women do worse then men to neccesitate a penalty, but nothing they can do better than men to justify a bonus to balance it out. I can find statistics which do show some areas where women outperform men, and a refusal to model them with ingame advantages to balance out their penalties or to even accept they exist does have some sexist implications imo.

About the only objetive, quantifiable difference between men and women (besides the obvious reproduction-related ones) is that, statistically, men are on average bigger than women, and that, given the same amount in training, they get more muscle mass. Everything else is debatable and subject to interpretation.

All the differences between what women and men can do on average (and I repeat we are speaking of statistic averages, not of absolute rules, there are hundreds of million of women who are taller and stronger than hundreds of millions of men) are mere extensions of the difference in frame.

A difference in frame isn't that important in modern society. You don't need muscles to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a president, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or to use a computer...etc., even physical work is facilitated by machines like agrimotor, so the differences between men and women are largely irrelevant.

D&D, however, usually portrays worlds in which people hack each other to pieces with big chunks of metal, and STR is relevant to that activity, so, if you try to model differences in STR between genders, women are at a disadvantage. And in order to balance the game, you have to give them something in exchange, and it becomes a fight because about everything you choose is debatable and becomes a point of contention and can be construed as sexist and as offensive for BOTH genders.

Example:

You give women a bonus to WIS (because some people claims that women are more perceptive). Men get offended because you are implying that they are dumber, women get offended because that reminds of the "female intuition" stereotype.

You give women a bonus to CHA (because they supposedly have better communication skills). Men get offended because you are saying that they are socially clumsier than women. women get offended because you are implying that the only thing they have on men is their looks.

You give women a bonus to DEX (because they are better at gimnastics). Men get offended because they are just as good as women at shooting and manual manipulation. Women get offended because they are being pushed into the typical lightweight archer/knife-thrower/acrobat fantasy stereotype (most often supporting characters) and out of the knight/barbarian/martial artist stereotype (who are protagonists most often in traditional fantasy).

You give women a bonus to CON (because they supposedly resist some diseases and infections better, and can swim longer distances on average). Men claim that they can take a punch better and carry weights under the sun for longer distances. Women are angrey because CON isn't the primary attacking stat for any class.

...etc.

I don't think it's worth the effort, but if I really had to do it, I would allow women to take some extra feat or bonus skills. Of course, that would offend/anger many people too...

[Talakeal]

Well in this case, because we're discussing actual demonstrable physical things. Which athletic endeavors tends to cover fairly well. I'm open to hearing any other examples. But I can't think of any off the top of my head. Certainly none that have been brought up in this thread. I mean you could include better color vision (women have superior color vision), but that doesn't usually have that much of an impact on actual gameplay. So what exactly is it that you're getting at?

My point is that if you are going to penalize someone for realism you need to give them some advantage to compensate to keep the game fair, even if it is something as simple and stupid as girls get -2 str because women are weak but +2 cha cause of teh boobz.

Now, I have absolutely no interest in verifying any of these, but I have heard that women are better at many things, including but not limited to better hand writing, better ability to endure g forces, better color vision, better fashion sense, being more empathic, being better caregivers, being more analytical, being more ruthless, being better at enduring pain, able to survive injuries, living longer, needing less food, having better fashion sense, being prettier, being protected by instinctual social taboos against harming women, being wiser, better at certain endurance sports or certain types of gymnastics, maturing faster than boys, being more socially conscious, being better performers, being immune to certain genetic diseases, having an innate resistance to certain diseases because of the way chromosomes work, being more profesional, better organizational skills, being cleaner, etc.

Most of these are probably either flat out wrong or the product of social constructs, but they are stereotypes about women I that I have heard and one should be able to use these stereotypes or something like them to come up with a rationale way to balance out any penalties they give females in game because they are "bad at athletics".

And if someone fully disbelieves all positive stereotypes or studies about women but embraces the negative ones I feel that says something not very flattering about their world view.

[Segev]

You give women a bonus to CON (because they supposedly resist some diseases and infections better, and can swim longer distances on average). ... Women are angrey because CON isn't the primary attacking stat for any class.

Clearly, women make better dragonfire adepts!

[AMFV]

My point is that if you are going to penalize someone for realism you need to give them some advantage to compensate to keep the game fair, even if it is something as simple and stupid as girls get -2 str because women are weak but +2 cha cause of teh boobz.

Now, I have absolutely no interest in verifying any of these, but I have heard that women are better at many things, including but not limited to better hand writing, better ability to endure g forces, better color vision, better fashion sense, being more empathic, being better caregivers, being more analytical, being more ruthless, being better at enduring pain, able to survive injuries, living longer, needing less food, having better fashion sense, being prettier, being protected by instinctual social taboos against harming women, being wiser, better at certain endurance sports or certain types of gymnastics, maturing faster than boys, being more socially conscious, being better performers, being immune to certain genetic diseases, having an innate resistance to certain diseases because of the way chromosomes work, being more profesional, better organizational skills, being cleaner, etc.

Most of these are probably either flat out wrong or the product of social constructs, but they are stereotypes about women I that I have heard and one should be able to use these stereotypes or something like them to come up with a rationale way to balance out any penalties they give females in game because they are "bad at athletics".

And if someone fully disbelieves all positive stereotypes or studies about women but embraces the negative ones I feel that says something not very flattering about their world view.

So present us these studies. You can't make a claim and then not produce studies to back it up. The physical differences have been documented excessively, the ones you're implying are not (with the exception of color vision, and the need of less food). Additionally some of the characteristics you present are in direct conflict (being more empathetic vs. being more ruthless). Also many of them are principally matters of opinion.

The thing is that in a game where you're looking for super-realism, making things "fair" isn't really that important. Since fairness isn't really all that realistic. If I were designing such a game, I might give women extra character points to make up for a physical disadvantage (although that's not realistic, but it offers some effective balancing). I'm not designing such a game (nor have I any interest). But you can't argue for hyper-realism and then argue for "fairness" those are in conflict.

[Aquillion]

So present us these studies. You can't make a claim and then not produce studies to back it up. The physical differences have been documented excessively, the ones you're implying are not (with the exception of color vision, and the need of less food). Additionally some of the characteristics you present are in direct conflict (being more empathetic vs. being more ruthless). Also many of them are principally matters of opinion.

The thing is that in a game where you're looking for super-realism, making things "fair" isn't really that important. Since fairness isn't really all that realistic. If I were designing such a game, I might give women extra character points to make up for a physical disadvantage (although that's not realistic, but it offers some effective balancing). I'm not designing such a game (nor have I any interest). But you can't argue for hyper-realism and then argue for "fairness" those are in conflict.First, I should say that I think that stat differences by gender are a silly idea in an RPG.

That said, there is some evidence (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201312/scientists-identify-why-girls-often-mature-faster-boys) that females mature faster than men, especially in the parts of the brain that deal with emotional control and empathy (which would, in D&D terms, mean they'd have higher wisdom than men at the age most adventures take place.) You could argue that some of the practical impact of this is down to social factors in terms of the differing gender-based expectations society sets, but it doesn't really matter in this case, since it'd still justify a stat difference if you wanted one for whatever reason. We don't have to worry about nature vs. nurture, just about the end result.

However, regardless, D&D isn't really a good game to go to if you want "realism" at the expense of balance. Just off the top of my head, the fact that every human character starts at the same level, gains XP at the same rate, advances (both physically and in terms of skills) at the same rate -- all of it is completely unrealistic, a lot more unrealistic than, say, having someone playing Xena, Warrior Princess. Or the fact that every race is balanced against each other (or at least tries to be -- sorry, Half-Orcs!), and that the really powerful races mysteriously always start out having learned less. If you are going to focus on gender-differences, having them mysteriously balanced by some sort of penalty or bonus elsewhere is no different than the ones for races; if the game can balance you for playing a dragon, I think it can balance playing a man!

(Judging from how "well" races are balanced, you'd end up with males as a +1 LA gender to account for their strength bonus. Perfect.)

[Segev]

(Judging from how "well" races are balanced, you'd end up with males as a +1 LA gender to account for their strength bonus. Perfect.)

...aaaaand "taking a negative level" just became a leg-crossingly distressing euphemism. :smalleek:

[Talakeal]

So present us these studies. You can't make a claim and then not produce studies to back it up.

I absolutely can and did.

I have seen articles about all of these things over the years, that is a true fact whether you choose to believe it or not. I don't believe the studies behind all of them ( or indeed most of them) were sound, but my point was that there is evidence out there to support advantages women have over men if you want to look for it, that is all.

I don't feel like spending several hours researching all of them just because you say I have to, if you care so much about citations you can Google them just as easily as I can.

[AMFV]

First, I should say that I think that stat differences by gender are a silly idea in an RPG.

That said, there is some evidence (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201312/scientists-identify-why-girls-often-mature-faster-boys) that females mature faster than men, especially in the parts of the brain that deal with emotional control and empathy (which would, in D&D terms, mean they'd have higher wisdom than men at the age most adventures take place.) You could argue that some of the practical impact of this is down to social factors in terms of the differing gender-based expectations society sets, but it doesn't really matter in this case, since it'd still justify a stat difference if you wanted one for whatever reason. We don't have to worry about nature vs. nurture, just about the end result.


That is true, I should have included that one in my list of demonstrable differences in favor of women. Although I'm not really sure if that one is actually that advantageous. The more Wisdom wouldn't really be accurate though. Since by the time most adventures are taking place, most Men and Women will be matured



However, regardless, D&D isn't really a good game to go to if you want "realism" at the expense of balance. Just off the top of my head, the fact that every human character starts at the same level, gains XP at the same rate, advances (both physically and in terms of skills) at the same rate -- all of it is completely unrealistic, a lot more unrealistic than, say, having someone playing Xena, Warrior Princess. Or the fact that every race is balanced against each other (or at least tries to be -- sorry, Half-Orcs!), and that the really powerful races mysteriously always start out having learned less. If you are going to focus on gender-differences, having them mysteriously balanced by some sort of penalty or bonus elsewhere is no different than the ones for races; if the game can balance you for playing a dragon, I think it can balance playing a man!

(Judging from how "well" races are balanced, you'd end up with males as a +1 LA gender to account for their strength bonus. Perfect.)

Well my point was that D&D isn't really a good system for that level of simulationism. It's not designed for it, and it doesn't do it well.


...aaaaand "taking a negative level" just became a leg-crossingly distressing euphemism. :smalleek:

Talk about a kick in the crotch.

Edit:


I absolutely can and did.

I have seen articles about all of these things over the years, that is a true fact. I don't believe the studies behind all of them were sound, but my point was that there is evidence out there to support advantages women have over men if you want to look for it, that is all.

I don't feel like spending several hours researching all of them just because you say I have to, if you care so much about citations you can Google them just as easily as I can.

I didn't make the claim, which means that I shouldn't be the one expecting to prove it.

[The Insanity]

That men are more intelligent than women, but that females have 'women's intuition'.
That's kinda the point. Or rather, in my setting (human) men have higher Intelligence due to them being the driving force behind scientific and arcane development, and progress in general (Strength and Constitution because they're physically larger than women). (Human) females, OTOH, have higher Wisdom and Charisma because they are the ones that create and manage the society.


I apologize, actually. I should have thought through it more before making such an aggressive post.
That's alright.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think one of the problems with the idea in general is stat stat bonuses tend to make a much bigger difference than first appears. For instance:


I gave +2 Str, Con and Int to males and +2 Dex, Wis and Cha to females for humans in my games.

A world in which men are on average 2 points smarter and women 2 points wiser is not that bad to imagine. It might inspire a few "girls suck at match" jokes, but it's manageable. But then you throw players into the mix, and players like to optimize.

(Melee) fighters need strength and constitution. Nobody in their right mind would make one out of a female in this system, because every +2 counts (kind of dependent on your character creation system). That means that all the classes that max out strength will have almost exclusively male members, and all classes that dump it mostly female members. So now the difference in strength isn't 2 points, it's more like 8. The average female hero has a strength of 8, a male hero has one of about 16. Every man you meet is massively stronger than every woman you meet.

And that's not too bad for strength, but it gets a little hairy at the mental stats. In a world build by players who like optimizing even just a little, there is no such thing as a female wizard, mathematician or engineer. Women are almost comically stupid by male standards, just like men are socially incompetent (and physically clumsy) compared to women. There's no such thing as a male rock star in a world build upon these bonuses.

At that point, the question is no longer "is it realistic that women have 2 more wisdom than men?" but "is it realistic women have 8 more wisdom than men?". No, it's not.

Could still be a very fun setting of course, realism doesn't always have too much impact on fun.

[PersonMan]

So now the difference in strength isn't 2 points, it's more like 8. The average female hero has a strength of 8, a male hero has one of about 16. Every man you meet is massively stronger than every woman you meet.

You're talking about adventurers, though. PCs are a horrible way to measure things like this.

Every optimized* PC of X class will be Y gender, so you'll end up with a huge score gap, but most NPCs won't have a point-buy maximized stat array. Nonelite array and such don't allow for every woman to have 8 Strength and 18 Wisdom, or every man to have 18 Strength and 8 Wisdom.

99% of people you meet will have stats between 9 and 12, because they're average. Maybe a 13 or two. Merchants are probably level one Experts or similar, with maybe a 13 Charisma, not PC-classed 8 Str/14 Dex/14 Con/13 Int/8 Wis/18 Cha social powerhouses.

*Unless they optimize a suboptimal concept, which is done a lot.

[Elderand]

You're talking about adventurers, though. PCs are a horrible way to measure things like this.

The only way to measure whether or not a rule change is good is to see how it impacts and interracts with the players. So it's not a horrible way to measure this, it's the only way that matters.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

But most of the people who actually matter to the story are PC-like, so that's the view you're getting of the world as a player. And the DM is just as likely to take the easy route to making a good fighter as the players are.

In the real world, if you'd get invited to a party with the rich and famous, you'd still meet female chess champions (okay, bad example, female business geniuses?) and male musicians.

It highly depends on your group of course, but I still think giving no bonuses and just letting people (both players and DM's) go by their own ideas results in more realistic differences between the sexes than trying to steer them by giving bonuses. They're already going to make most barbarians male.

[Marlowe]

Largely because of this thread, I just took it upon myself to read all nine volumes of the original "Battle Angel Alita" (aka GUNNM) to further understand the anime-waif business.

I'm happy to report that our petite heroine, in spite of being an iconic anime waif1, got to make it from being a wreck pulled out of a scrap pile to the end 13 years later without using a weapon larger than a heavy-duty knife, or assault rifle2.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mHauDcgac2Q/UxdX8scUwUI/AAAAAAAABYI/yego5WRgpN4/s1600/battle+angel+alita2.jpg

So I suppose I'm still looking for those shows with the 90lb girls firing M2s from the shoulder that everyone else apparently sees all the time.

1 Although only two volumes were ever animated, so she's really more a Manga-Waif.

2In fact, she doesn't get to use a gun until volume 5. It's a Smith & Wesson Model 610 revolver, apparently.

[goto124]

It highly depends on your group of course, but I still think giving no bonuses and just letting people (both players and DM's) go by their own ideas results in more realistic differences between the sexes than trying to steer them by giving bonuses. They're already going to make most barbarians male.

If the GM wants to make sure no player comes to the table with non-male barbarians (for whatever reason), the GM can just write "barbarians must be male" in the pitch for the game, and reject any non-male barbarians if a player still tries to get one in.

Also, do people not like female barbarians? :smalltongue:

[8BitNinja]

Also, do people not like female barbarians? :smalltongue:

No, It's just that every barbarian people roll must be Conan

[Lvl 2 Expert]

If the GM wants to make sure no player comes to the table with non-male barbarians (for whatever reason), the GM can just write "barbarians must be male" in the pitch for the game, and reject any non-male barbarians if a player still tries to get one in.

Also, do people not like female barbarians? :smalltongue:

It's not dislike at all, it's the idea that some aspects of a game world are better off being realistic (for some reason). Most cases of testosterone poisoning, as the "barbarian" condition is also called sometimes, I know of are found in male subjects. As such, in a realistic d&d world (yes, with dragons) most barbarians should be male. And I think that's exactly what you'll see if you do a statistical analysis of a few hundred randomly selected d&d games. That's something entirely different from not allowing female barbarians at all, or from not allowing female barbarians to be good at what they do by giving them a penalty to certain stats (although to be fair a dex and cha based barbarian might also be pretty cool, but that's not the point). If the world has to conform to certain expectations the players have, who better to leave in charge of that world than the players? Sometimes they don't need to be herded.

Making males more suited for a career as a fighter or barbarian and females better for playing a cleric, sorcerer or bard is like setting minimum quotas for how many men there must be in the board of a company, it's a measure to enforce something people already do without any interference at all.

[PersonMan]

The only way to measure whether or not a rule change is good is to see how it impacts and interracts with the players. So it's not a horrible way to measure this, it's the only way that matters.

I'm replying to this:


Every man you meet is massively stronger than every woman you meet.

He doesn't say 'all of the PCs' or 'all of the important NPCs', he says 'everyone'.


But most of the people who actually matter to the story are PC-like, so that's the view you're getting of the world as a player. And the DM is just as likely to take the easy route to making a good fighter as the players are.

Yes, and? We're not talking about people who actually matter, we're talking about


Every man [...] [and] woman you meet.


In the real world, if you'd get invited to a party with the rich and famous, you'd still meet female chess champions (okay, bad example, female business geniuses?) and male musicians.

A party of people who likely have little to no statistical representation isn't going to be affected by stat modifiers, apart from maybe the general description. "A room full of powerful men and women [add 2-3 specific examples]" is enough in a lot of cases.

[SimonMoon6]

Well that depends on culture. There are certainly cultures where women are more feared than men, in certain contexts.

In the real world?

Or only in the "heh, heh, wouldn't be hot if, like, the drow chicks with big bewbs were super dominant, and they could wear lots of leather to show off their smokin' hot bodies because they're so badass" worlds of D&D and its ilk?

I'm pretty sure that it's an actual physical sex-based characteristic and not just a cultural one. (1) Men are larger and stronger and therefore scarier. (2) Men have more testosterone and are therefore more likely to be aggressive, even in situations that don't call for it. (3) Men have penises and can therefore easily force themselves on the unwilling (and are more likely to do so because of the whole testosterone thing).

I don't see any of that as being cultural.

[Segev]

(3) Men have penises and can therefore easily force themselves on the unwillingThis is flat-out false. The presence of a penis does not make one any more capable of "forcing" oneself on somebody else. Rape - which is the only situation wherein "forcing oneself" in the context of "having a penis" being relevant that I can think of - is not about the actual act of sex, in the first place; it's about power and violation, and while a lot of legal tests for it differentiate between "mere" sexual assault and rape based on whether Ikea's instruction diagram was followed, it doesn't require a penis to achieve the same "forced" results.

Furthermore, guys don't have conscious control over that particular reaction, so it is quite possible for women to force themselves on men. Even if one insists that tab A must go into slot B for it to "count."


(and are more likely to do so because of the whole testosterone thing).Perhaps, but this is the same line of argument that is used to suggest that women are happier as nurturers staying home and raising kids, so you may want to be careful about asserting it if you want to avoid inviting that argument. (If you think it's a true corollary, fine, but I do insist upon consistency wrt positions on what physio-emotional effects can be physical-sex-determined. You CAN find studies supporting both assertions, as well as others refuting them; it's a valid line of discussion and inquiry. If, perhaps, a touch heated for this forum.)

[Donnadogsoth]

Largely because of this thread, I just took it upon myself to read all nine volumes of the original "Battle Angel Alita" (aka GUNNM) to further understand the anime-waif business.

I'm happy to report that our petite heroine, in spite of being an iconic anime waif1, got to make it from being a wreck pulled out of a scrap pile to the end 13 years later without using a weapon larger than a heavy-duty knife, or assault rifle2.

So I suppose I'm still looking for those shows with the 90lb girls firing M2s from the shoulder that everyone else apparently sees all the time.

1 Although only two volumes were ever animated, so she's really more a Manga-Waif.

2In fact, she doesn't get to use a gun until volume 5. It's a Smith & Wesson Model 610 revolver, apparently.

Point six-four seconds of Google searching for "anime waif firing big gun" had this as the first result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03_vbT3I0Jw

1:06 (one-handed!)
1:17
2:53-3:00

They look like light girls with heavy guns to me. Even a .22 has a kick to it, so I can imagine what an assault rifle, shotgun, or sniper rifle has. And of course these girls are depicted as femme as possible, certainly not weightlifters.

[8BitNinja]

(3) Men have penises and can therefore easily force themselves on the unwilling (and are more likely to do so because of the whole testosterone thing).

Are you saying that most men are rapists?

[wumpus]

99% of people you meet will have stats between 9 and 12, because they're average. Maybe a 13 or two. Merchants are probably level one Experts or similar, with maybe a 13 Charisma, not PC-classed 8 Str/14 Dex/14 Con/13 Int/8 Wis/18 Cha social powerhouses.

This assumes some odd ways of the merchant getting such a high charisma:
* NPCs who go into trade have high charisma to start with, unfortunately the source material usually doesn't allow this (traders are the sons/daughters of traders)
* NPCs with seriously valuable items are probably PC-powerhouses (the village ones are between 9-12, the ones who can give change for astral diamonds, not so much). A 10 charisma trader doesn't get that rich (expect intelligence and wisdom to be decent as well), or stay rich long enough for the PCs to meet him.
* Charisma is a trainable stat. Quite possible, and trader families presumably have experience in training it up. Presumably only good to 13 or so (your village blacksmith obviously will have a strength of 13 or more for this reason).
* Lamarkian evolution: hey, it's your world, make it how you want. Trader families keep increasing charisma. Note that this should slow down after a few generations: you only get a few "points worth" to put into charisma, and the point buy goes up geometrically.

I'd assume that "trainable stat" works the best with the source material. At high levels you can use more competitive methods to justify why the NPCs can routinely save against the bard/sorcerer/other high charisma character's charms. But really, if your society doesn't allow for a lot of social movement, your NPCs are not going to be remotely optimized (until shear number of levels forces social movement).

[radialburst]

Didn't an early version of d&d have ability restrictions due to gender?

[Talakeal]

Are you saying that most men are rapists?

Probably the other way around (most rapists are men, not most men are rapists).

[8BitNinja]

Probably the other way around (most rapists are men, not most men are rapists).

thank you for clarifying

[Mr Beer]

(3) Men have penises and can therefore easily force themselves on the unwilling (and are more likely to do so because of the whole testosterone thing).

Raping another human isn't 'easy'. Many rapists fail to penetrate their victims for that very reason.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

He doesn't say 'all of the PCs' or 'all of the important NPCs', he says 'everyone'.

So the first time I said it I should have been clearer, that way I wouldn't have had to make the second post. Fine.

[Marlowe]

Point six-four seconds of Google searching for "anime waif firing big gun" had this as the first result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03_vbT3I0Jw

1:06 (one-handed!)
1:17
2:53-3:00

They look like light girls with heavy guns to me. Even a .22 has a kick to it, so I can imagine what an assault rifle, shotgun, or sniper rifle has. And of course these girls are depicted as femme as possible, certainly not weightlifters.

Let's see:

A video claiming to be "top ten girls with guns anime" that omits Black Lagoon and and Noir (and quite a few others), but INCLUDES Girls Und Panzer (where nobody even picks up a gun as such)? That's insanely silly.

Most of the shots in the video are plainly fan-art or promotional material, and are of people POSING with weapons rather than using them. It's anyone's guess how accurate they are to their original shows.

As some unfortunate events in Africa these last few decades have proved; you don't need to be very physically big to use an assault rifle. Children can do it. Hells, I was pretty small the first few times I fired a 12-gauge. Not to mention that a larger weapon actually HELPS deal with recoil. There's a reason they don't make snub-nosed .44s.

Are you now altering your claim from "girls shouldn't be allowed to use massive cannons" to "girls shouldn't be allowed to use basic infantry weapons"?:smallconfused:

[Donnadogsoth]

Let's see:

A video claiming to be "top ten girls with guns anime" that omits Black Lagoon and and Noir (and quite a few others), but INCLUDES Girls Und Panzer (where nobody even picks up a gun as such)? That's insanely silly.

Most of the shots in the video are plainly fan-art or promotional material, and are of people POSING with weapons rather than using them. It's anyone's guess how accurate they are to their original shows.

As some unfortunate events in Africa these last few decades have proved; you don't need to be very physically big to use an assault rifle. Children can do it. Hells, I was pretty small the first few times I fired a 12-gauge. Not to mention that a larger weapon actually HELPS deal with recoil. There's a reason they don't make snub-nosed .44s.

Are you now altering your claim from "girls shouldn't be allowed to use massive cannons" to "girls shouldn't be allowed to use basic infantry weapons"?:smallconfused:

Are you claiming that firing a whatever-it-was rifle one-handed is realistic?

I don't care how accurate the stills are to their particular shows, the point was the image, not the context.

How effectively do children in Africa use basic infantry weapons?

[Marlowe]

Are you claiming that firing a whatever-it-was rifle one-handed is realistic?

I don't care how accurate the stills are to their particular shows, the point was the image, not the context.

How effectively do children in Africa use basic infantry weapons?

The issue is NOT whether firing an assault rifle one-handed is realistic (is she even firing it? Looks like she's just posing to me). We KNOW that's not realistic. It's not realistic for a 300lb man either. the question says NOTHING about whether guys or girls should have different stats.

We're looking for you finding examples of small girls using big guns in anime. You haven't produced that. Instead you've produced a montage of posed stills of girls with standard infantry weapons. This is not it. And the fact that your sample video includes GIRL UND PANZER, an anime with NO GUNS THAT AREN'T VEHICAL-MOUNTED, significantly damages your credibility as someone who knows anything of the medium.

You've also yet to prove that this "Small girl with enormous cannon" practice that you 'see all the time" crosses over into roleplaying characters to a degree that it requires curtailing. This hasn't even been done at all.

It's hardly relevant how well child soldiers use guns. Your claim has not involved much attention to the issue of competency with a weapon. You don't seem to want smaller people to have big weapons at all.

[Donnadogsoth]

The issue is NOT whether firing an assault rifle one-handed is realistic (is she even firing it? Looks like she's just posing to me). We KNOW that's not realistic. It's not realistic for a 300lb man either. the question says NOTHING about whether guys or girls should have different stats.

We're looking for you finding examples of small girls using big guns in anime. You haven't produced that. Instead you've produced a montage of posed stills of girls with standard infantry weapons. This is not it. And the fact that your sample video includes GIRL UND PANZER, an anime with NO GUNS THAT AREN'T VEHICAL-MOUNTED, significantly damages your credibility as someone who knows anything of the medium.

You've also yet to prove that this "Small girl with enormous cannon" practice that you 'see all the time" crosses over into roleplaying characters to a degree that it requires curtailing. This hasn't even been done at all.

It's hardly relevant how well child soldiers use guns. Your claim has not involved much attention to the issue of competency with a weapon. You don't seem to want smaller people to have big weapons at all.

If it's hardly relevant then perhaps don't bring it up. Though I thought it perfectly relevant. Do you believe physical strength counts for null with regard to effectively handling large small arms?

On small, thin girls with big guns, did I say I see it "all the time"? Like, every anime video or manga image I've ever seen? No, but I see it, and when I show you examples, they don't count because tanks or posing or something. I've seen it enough to impress in my mind, and a search will find ever larger guns with ever smaller girls, but they won't count either because of some criterion of yours.

I'm sure she's a weightlifter under that smock.
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/813790-anime

Ever bigger guns...
https://www.google.ca/search?q=anime+girl+big+gun&biw=1047&bih=504&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjl7ZCOzu7KAhUU3WMKHbynD5kQ_AUIBigB&dpr=1.3#imgrc=_

[YossarianLives]

large small arms
I'm probably an ignoramus, but uh... What?

[Donnadogsoth]

I'm probably an ignoramus, but uh... What?

Sorry, by "large small arms" I mean large caliber pistols (e.g., .44), and long arms like shotguns and big-game hunting rifles. I'd call a .22 rifle a small arm but not a large small arm, as it were.

[YossarianLives]

Sorry, by "large small arms" I mean large caliber pistols (e.g., .44), and long arms like shotguns and big-game hunting rifles. I'd call a .22 rifle a small arm but not a large small arm, as it were.
Ahhh. Thank you for clarifying.

[Marlowe]

If it's hardly relevant then perhaps don't bring it up. Though I thought it perfectly relevant. Do you believe physical strength counts for null with regard to effectively handling large small arms? You bought it up. With an explanation point. Not me.


On small, thin girls with big guns, did I say I see it "all the time"? Like, every anime video or manga image I've ever seen? No, but I see it, and when I show you examples, they don't count because tanks or posing or something. I've seen it enough to impress in my mind, and a search will find ever larger guns with ever smaller girls, but they won't count either because of some criterion of yours. If they're not using the weapons, but just holding them, even more so if THERE ARE NO SUCH WEAPONS IN THE EXAMPLE, then no. It isn't an example.

You've shifted your ground twice in the last two posts, first from mode of handling to physical strength, and also from Big Guns (still haven't clarified what this means. Someone else kept bringing up .50 cal HMGs, but that's not your fault), to basic infantry assault weapons. Handling the one is silly for anyone, handling the second is, unfortunately, a mundane reality for thousands of people of all builds, ages, and gender all over the world. Somehow you effect to find both equally unthinkable.

[ThinkMinty]

It's limiting, don't do it.

Also, to be that guy, in the context of fantasy, why would we have to drag the dreary, repetitive, done-to-death thing about men having higher strength or not?

It's fantasy. I'm not even saying "but dragons", I'm saying you could arrange the society in other configurations without having to get boring, been-done and subjectively sexist about it. Fantasy doesn't have to reflect reality. You can have alternate paths of development of species, or if we wanna ditch the hard-on sci-fi tedium of explaining away the wonder, just do fun things for the sake of them being fun.

You could reverse the thing and restrict physical classes to women and magic use to men. This doesn't so much require an origin story as it would make everything funny. Most animals have the female ones bigger than the male ones, so fantasy humans developing along these lines isn't that absurd.

You could do it by social class, where the poor peeps do the physical jobs and the rich do the casting. Before things like mass education and the printing press, this makes an alarming amount of sense as to how reality would play out with magical study in it.

You could just do it by fluff and culture, with people going outside their box getting tut-tuts from pearl-clutching NPCs.

At the heart of it, I don't see why you would restrict player choice, though. Warrior women are a staple of fantasy storytelling, as are male spellcasters, and more things to optimize means less pure-creative choices to make since you can't make a sub-optimal choice without someone givin' you a dirty look.

I do think you'd alienate more people than you'd attract with gendered mechanics, though.

[8BitNinja]

I was actually thinking of developing a western RPG named Yuma, which was going to take place in Arizona in the 1880s. It was actually going to involve social classes which you would roll for, and it would affect both your starting money and class you could play as. For example, you couldn't play as a businessman unless you were upper class, and you couldn't be a bandit unless you were lower class. There were still others you could play as without a certain social class, such as the rancher or lawman.

But the idea was dropped and I made Futurequest instead

[Frozen_Feet]

Ooooooh.
In the game.

Since the fluff doesn't need mechanics to support everything it defines, mechanics-enforced sexism is just sitting here being sexist. It's gratuitous and unecessary. Making an extra effort to create a discrimination that we could do without. Finding it offensive is a natural reaction. And now the sexism broke from the fragile containment you built and is running rampant in the real world.

If you want the conflicts to stay in the game as well, don't put your sexism in mechanics. Might not be enough, but at least you can argue you tried.

This kind of reasoning boils down to "numbers are more oppressive than words". :smalltongue:

More seriously: like I said to Lorsa, mechanics and description are parts of the same continuum. They are both within the game. You are correct not every piece of description needs a mathematical rule to model it, but your follow-up, the idea that "women get -1 to Strength" is more sexist or offensive than "in this game world, female fighters are treated with prejudice", crosses the Parody Horizon in its inanity.

But that's not all. These rules don't even model the same things. To further elaborate, let me list four possible rules:

1) Male characters get +1 to Strength at character creation.
2) Female fighters are capped to 18/50 Strength and males to 18/00.
3) Female fighters meet social prejudices within the game world because "girls are weak".
4) Fighter class is banned for females.

Furthermore, assume randomly generated stats.

These rules all have different functions and lead to different play experiences depending on which ones are in play.

Rule 1) is meant to model a statistical fact of men being, on average, stronger than women.

Rule 2) is meant to model a statistical fact of strongest men being stronger than the strongest women.

Rule 3) is meant to model social attitudes in a setting where female fighters exist, but are looked down upon.

Rule 4) is meant to model a social reality where absolutely no-one will allow a woman to be trained as a fighter.

If rule 1) is active, in a random character generation system, you get more male characters who are viable as Fighters, but you will also get a good number of female characters who are just as viable.

If rule 2) is active, in a random character generation system, you get as many female characters as male characters who are viable for fighters, but the absolute best women are slightly worse than the absolute best men.

If rules 1) and 2) are active, in a random character generation system, you will get less female fighters and the absolute best women are worse than the absolute best men. You will still get a good number of viable fighting women, including many which are much better than the average male fighter. As a matter of statistical eventuality, you will indeed get a situation where a female character is best suited to be a fighter out of characters rolled for a specific game session or campaign.

Rules 1) and 2) make females less optimal than males in some corner cases, but they don't render female fighters unplayable, and speaking from experience, these sort of rules are invisible for 95% of a game. They're noticeable in character creation and level up, but fade to the background in actual play save for when huge masses of characters are present.

If only rule 3) is in effect, with no numerical adjustments to reflect this reality, you get a setting where female fighters are just as competent as males but no-one takes this into account. I.e., a world of blind-idiot sexism. These sort of "fluff" rules are noticeable every time the players interact with mainstream society of the setting. This can be up to 95% of actual play time. It is absolutely hilarious you think rules like 1) and 2) are more likely to "spill out" and cause offense in players.

If rule 3) is effect along with rules 1) and 2), you get a world where female fighters are looked down upon due to weakness of the average woman, but there are still a good number of female fighters who defy the stereotype due to being as good or better than most of male fighters. I.e, world of realistic sexism. This is where you can get most of the traditional coming-of-age stories, akin to Disney's Mulan. Since sex and gender are impossible to ignore with this combination of rules, I'd reserve it for games where exploration of the in-game society is the point. (I.e., games like Noitahovi, Kagematsu, or the hypothetical games about Mulan or Bride's Story)

Rule 4) sits in a category of its own. Where as rules 1), 2) and 3) change how you will play a female fighter and what stories will result from it, in a game with rule 4) you don't have playable female fighters and no stories of them. Any combination of the former three rules allows for examination, discussion and even rejection of sexism; rule 4) does not.

The point here is that rules like 1), 2) and 3) are not stealth bans of female fighters, and treating them as such is dumb. Also, all of these rules, have different functions and different end results, so they are not mutually exchangeable.

---

As for actual games which use them:

1st Ed AD&D uses 2) and is ambivalent about 3). As such, as long as you can get over yourself about a rare STR 18/51+ male fighter being better, you can kick ass and take names all day with your STR 18/50 female fighter. At least you're still stronger as all the male elves and halflings!

Noitahovi uses 1) and flips 3); men tend to be stronger than women, but women make up the ruling class of society so female knights and warladies are not rare. As noted earlier, pretty much no-one who has played the game has raised the complaints people in this thread have. If you have trouble following, ask yourself: which is better, being as strong as a man, or getting men to do what you want?

Kagematsu variably uses 4), or some combination of 1), 2) and 3), with the added twist that male players are all forced to play female characters. According to many posts in this thread, this should be the most horrible game in existence, but I've heard only positive feedback from those who actually played it. :smalltongue:

---

Much of the above is recap or restatement of things I've said earlier in this thread, but I felt the need to repeat myself since this topic keeps going in circles. Most of the supposed counter-arguments revolve around game balance or optimization. As noted priorly, an RPG focused on simulation or exploration, whether of a genre or reality, doesn't need to balance all possible PCs against each other! And if your players are obsessive-compulsive min-maxers, use random character generation. That would, at least, be a healthy change of pace.

I will not be responding to any arguments which boil down to "but random generation is bad because muh character concept." Again: I have years of convention GMing experience using randomly generated and pregenerated characters. They have not proven to be crippling flaws of game design and you'd have to be a wizard to convince me otherwise.

---

Now as for the tangent "D&D is not a good game for different stats".

Depends. 1st AD&D already has one half of the equation. Placing a rule like "male characters need 10% more food" in there, along with "Strength score above 17 increases food consumption by +5% and Exceptional Strength +1% to +10% based on percentile score" would fit quite well if you wanted to "balance" it. As an early edition of D&D, paying attention to stuff like food actually is intended part of the game at low levels. This edition also has rules for Disease & Parasites as well as Morale, so if you wanted to, it'd be easy to fit in modifiers of (f.ex.) women being more resilient to disease, or men being more protective of women. This edition is a hilariously schizophrenic combination of abstraction and exaggarated realism to begin with, so it fits the mood.

If you wanted to do this in a d20 game, you'd have to do a lot more work. The game's level of detail is suitable, but most of the relevant details are missing. First thing to do would be to find weight-lifting charts for men and women (easy) and compare them with carrying capacity tables and lifting rules of the base system (also easy as it uses real units). This way, you can approximate what the difference in Strength scores should be. Next, you'd have to revamp rules for speed and running using fitness tables for real men and women. Finding the relevant statistics is easy, fitting them into the rules is not. You might want to create some feedback between Strength, Constitution and size (height & weight). Also, return to random character creation. Finally, go through rest of the system and add fiddly circumstantial modifiers and food consumption rules like in AD&D above.

The above might be worth it if you're making a low fantasy d20 variant or porting over Noitahovi (etc.). If you wanted to play up the fantasy angle, it might be worth it to consider whether species other than humans follow the same paradigm, or subvert or invert it. The Strength rules could be flipped for Drow and Gnolls, while Elves might have no differences between sexes (etc.).

---

Someone here mentioned how "we have some studies suggesting women grow up earlier than men".

"Some studies" is an understatement. It borders on trivial knowledge that girls develop faster socially between 2 and 4 years of age, and that the onset puberty happens ~1.5 years earlier for girls. You'd have to live under a rock and never opent your 7th grade Biology and Sex Ed books to not know these things.

Applying such trivia for games would be a bit harder, though. Most games assume the player characters start out as adults or young adults, so such differences would not come up. (Save in backstories.) For it to be worth to model these things, you'd have to play a game about growing up, covering years of in-game time. Something like Harry Potter, perhaps? The characters start as preteens and the game follows them through puberty to early adulthood.

I find this idea strange compelling. Maybe I'll implement it for my next convention campaign. :smallwink:

[8BitNinja]

Fighters don't have to be strong, you could be a fighter who uses a rapier or bow

[Jormengand]

Holy smokes, I've got it!

Males, to represent their increased strength over women, get a +2 bonus to strength. However, females have learned to compensate for their lack of strength by making more accurate sword swings, lifting objects more efficiently, and so forth. Therefore, they treat their strength score as 2 higher for all purposes, meaning that, for example, they get a +1 on most melee weapon attack and damage rolls, and their strength score can go down to -1 without rendering them helpless.

To represent the malnutrition and disease rife in this era (as well as imperfect techniques for creating constructs and so forth, all characters permanently lose 2 points of strength upon character creation, and there is no way to restore these points of strength.

[8BitNinja]

I like what Jormengand is thing to say, but there is 1 fatal flaw in his plan

What's the difference? There is none

[A Tad Insane]

I like what Jormengand is thing to say, but there is 1 fatal flaw in his plan

What's the difference? There is none

Exactly. That's why Jorm is amazing at truespeak

[8BitNinja]

So we should just give up on the whole idea?

[CharonsHelper]

So we should just give up on the whole idea?

Well - I think from this thread - in my game instead of making all Psion classes (sort of psychic thing) female and then make the beefiest classes male only (a tentative plan), I'll probably just make it so that 1/2 the Psion classes are female only & the other 1/2 are male only. Each 1/2 having a significantly different vibe. (sort of a saidin/saidar thing - only with less overlap in what they can accomplish)

[Jormengand]

I like what Jormengand is thing to say, but there is 1 fatal flaw in his plan

What's the difference? There is none

That's the point. Whatever your reasoning, you can just as easily argue that men and women are mechanically equivalent as you can that they are different. If you like, they're different, but they amount to the same thing.

(Also I'm not a he).

[Segev]

(Also I'm not a he).
But... are you a sidhe?

[Donnadogsoth]

You bought it up. With an explanation point. Not me.
If they're not using the weapons, but just holding them, even more so if THERE ARE NO SUCH WEAPONS IN THE EXAMPLE, then no. It isn't an example.

You've shifted your ground twice in the last two posts, first from mode of handling to physical strength, and also from Big Guns (still haven't clarified what this means. Someone else kept bringing up .50 cal HMGs, but that's not your fault), to basic infantry assault weapons. Handling the one is silly for anyone, handling the second is, unfortunately, a mundane reality for thousands of people of all builds, ages, and gender all over the world. Somehow you effect to find both equally unthinkable.

No, Marlowe, you were the first to bring up African soldier children, post 596.


As some unfortunate events in Africa these last few decades have proved; you don't need to be very physically big to use an assault rifle. Children can do it. Hells, I was pretty small the first few times I fired a 12-gauge. Not to mention that a larger weapon actually HELPS deal with recoil. There's a reason they don't make snub-nosed .44s.

Do you believe physical strength counts for null with regard to effectively handling large small arms?

[8BitNinja]

Wow, this just got really dark

[GrayGriffin]

You know, with all this talk about "super strong anime waifs" and whether or not they exist, why don't we look at some non-anime media? Also starring a skinny little girl with disproportionate super strength. I'm talking of course about Pippi Longstocking. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking)

[awa]

Don't know if she counts she has explicit superhuman strength and the fact that she is not normal is the entire point.

I don't think anyone is saying that girls aren't allowed to have super strength as a super power just that without magic chi or other super natural abilities men are typically going to be stronger in most of the ways a game like d&d cares about.

[AMFV]

That's the point. Whatever your reasoning, you can just as easily argue that men and women are mechanically equivalent as you can that they are different. If you like, they're different, but they amount to the same thing.

(Also I'm not a he).

Not really, at least not if absolute realism is your goal. Women do not learn to hit things more accurately than men to compensate in the real world. In the real world, women are not as good at physical fighting as men are. That's just the way it plays out for a myriad of real-world reasons.

I think that Frozen Feet has it right though, we should look at genre considerations...

If a game or setting is super-realistic. It will make it extremely difficult for women to be successful warriors, they will have substantial disadvantages and women who are even mildly competent will be remembered for many many years to come, like Boadicea or Molly Pitcher. There are very few actual fantasy settings that are written this way, and very few games support it. This would be the Hovels and Huts type setting. In that sort of setting one would model things as realistically as possible.

You can have a setting where prejudice exists in game (as Frozen Feet mentioned) that is not reflected mechanically. This fits with most fantasy nowadays, and is what most settings of 3.5 D&D and other such games represent. There is nothing at all wrong with this approach.

You can have a setting where it just isn't mentioned much, this is the other bulk of D&D-ish type settings, and many homebrew settings

The last approach is aggressive equality. Such as you see with Pathfinder, women are aggressively included in everything, this may even cause a backlash, as we've seen with Pathfinder. Although, I, personally don't know if that's justified.

[ImNotTrevor]

You bought it up. With an explanation point. Not me.
If they're not using the weapons, but just holding them, even more so if THERE ARE NO SUCH WEAPONS IN THE EXAMPLE, then no. It isn't an example.

You've shifted your ground twice in the last two posts, first from mode of handling to physical strength, and also from Big Guns (still haven't clarified what this means. Someone else kept bringing up .50 cal HMGs, but that's not your fault), to basic infantry assault weapons. Handling the one is silly for anyone, handling the second is, unfortunately, a mundane reality for thousands of people of all builds, ages, and gender all over the world. Somehow you effect to find both equally unthinkable.

You want sources?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmallGirlBigGun

Common enough for a TV tropes page.
It's a thing.
They have source links at the bottom. Review at your own leisure.
Maybe not a thing in whatever media you consume, but it's still a thing.

Are we done complaining that this isn't a thing now? Because it has now been shown to be a thing in many forms of media, including the Animus and Mangos. (Most of it is there, but there are other examples of the trope.)

[goto124]

But what about muscleless males with huge guns?

[ImNotTrevor]

But what about muscleless males with huge guns?

I would consider that to be exactly as stupid. That's just me, but wiry thin people juggling heavy artillery will always make my eyes roll.

I think making it a little anime waifu was simply providing an example of the general trope "small people with large weapons" that the discussion got stuck on.

But as I've said multiple times before, these games are about fun. Play the games you find fun. If your version of fun is a tiny person with a very large weapon, then play a system that allows it and have a blast. I really couldn't care less what characters you play at tables other than mine, and depending on the mood of the current game I may still not care. But walking into a game of Apocalypse World wanting to be a pink-haired schoolgirl with a sniper rifle (when we aren't being silly on purpose, obviously) will likely result in many rolled eyes and asking what your ACTUAL character is after a good chuckle. Outside of similar circumstances, play what you want. It doesn't affect me.

[8BitNinja]

That's the point. Whatever your reasoning, you can just as easily argue that men and women are mechanically equivalent as you can that they are different. If you like, they're different, but they amount to the same thing.

1. So then don't change the rules, but this a thread for the people who do

[Aquillion]

The really big guns in media tend to be totally unrealistic for any gender. Like, Barret's arm-cannon would break his arm at the shoulder; even if his bones are reinforced or something, some of the stuff he does with it would still knock him on his ass. (It also just physically does not make sense. Like, going from where it detaches, there's simply not enough room in the weapon for any sort of working gun.)

And that's without wondering where he gets all the bullets for it. Or all the characters who fire rocket launchers outrageously fast, without bracing themselves, and with no regard for the backdraft. Or anyone who ever carried a minigun like a personal weapon ever, or fired it without carefully mounting it somehow, or somehow fired it for more than a few seconds without any clear indication of where they're getting all the bullets.

[The Insanity]

It might inspire a few "girls suck at match" jokes, but it's manageable.
Such jokes would be stupid, because under my houserule girls don't suck at math, males are just somewhat better at it.


Nobody in their right mind would make one out of a female in this system
Lol. That's rather insulting, don't you think? I'd see myself and a few other of my friends making a female warrior with my houserules. Just like I see many people making warriors out of races that don't gain bonuses to Str or Con.


That means that all the classes that max out strength will have almost exclusively male members, and all classes that dump it mostly female members. So now the difference in strength isn't 2 points, it's more like 8. The average female hero has a strength of 8, a male hero has one of about 16. Every man you meet is massively stronger than every woman you meet.
You're talking in context of PCs, right? PCs are exceptional, not the norm, so I don't see a problem.


In a world build by players who like optimizing even just a little, there is no such thing as a female wizard, mathematician or engineer. Women are almost comically stupid by male standards, just like men are socially incompetent (and physically clumsy) compared to women. There's no such thing as a male rock star in a world build upon these bonuses.
I wouldn't use such absolutes ("no such thing"?), but other than that? I'm happy to hear that it works as intended.


At that point, the question is no longer "is it realistic that women have 2 more wisdom than men?" but "is it realistic women have 8 more wisdom than men?".
Realism has nothing to do with it.


If the GM wants to make sure no player comes to the table with non-male barbarians (for whatever reason), the GM can just write "barbarians must be male" in the pitch for the game, and reject any non-male barbarians if a player still tries to get one in.
I'd rather encourage what I like than ban.


Also, do people not like female barbarians? :smalltongue:
I love female barbarians. But then again I don't equalize "barbarian" with "great strength".

[digiman619]

There are only three ways this can EVER be a good idea:
1) You're making a new race with such a great degree of sexual dimorphism that they're essentially two races.
2) Prestige classes that that are only for one gender for flavor reasons, like vestigal virgins or a brotherhood like the freemasons.
3) Archetypes that represent a particular heritage that only teach their secrets to one gender.

Any other reason for to do this is a bad idea. While it's true that males tend to be stronger than females, they also don't tend to be able to cast fireballs or can heal through touch. A certain level of suspension of disbelief is needed to play these games, so the difference between genders are small enough that they don't need to affect your stats.

[The Insanity]

You're making a new race with such a great degree of sexual dimorphism that they're essentially two races.
I do. It's called "human". It's similar to RL human, except where it's not.


A certain level of suspension of disbelief is needed to play these games, so the difference between genders are small enough that they don't need to affect your stats.
What if suspension of disbelief or realism doesn't even enter the equation?


Any other reason for to do this is a bad idea.
I wouldn't call every other reason a bad idea. Some might be, some might not. I don't think mine is.

[goto124]

2) Prestige classes that that are only for one gender for flavor reasons, like vestigal virgins or a brotherhood like the freemasons.

Is there a prestige class for male virgins? :smalltongue:

[The Insanity]

Is there a prestige class for male virgins? :smalltongue:
Any Wizard prc?

[Jormengand]

1. So then don't change the rules, but this a thread for the people who do

So we're not allowed to say why you shouldn't?

[Marlowe]

Dom, in direct answer to your question, I will say that physical strength matters far less in handling a weapon than practice and familiarity with it. This is something your model is obviously lacking, since you seem opposed to allowing people below a certain body weight to pick up certain weapons in the first place. I'm 191cm and I would NOT consider that an advantage in handling some of the weapons depicted.

I must say I'm impressed by the prominence of Black Rock Shooter examples in your image search, and must compliment you on your discerning taste, given that you apparently see it all the time and it's not the easiest Anime to find.

As for the rest, mostly falls squarely into the "Superhuman shooter" category or "Not actually an anime" or both (Hi! Arnage of Huckebein! Loved watching you get stonewalled by a textile merchant!).

Or is it possible you did a lazy image search again?

I thought you and IamNotTrevor said this was something you see all the time?

What exactly do you watch? And how does it effect your gaming that you feel you have to go online and complain about it? Do you ACTUALLY have to pass rules in your club against people playing Diece of the Numbers expys? If so, I envy your club.

[goto124]

So we're not allowed to say why you shouldn't?

It's far from helpful anyway, especially in a thread that's about HOW and WHY we should implement sex- or gender-based mechanical differences.

[AMFV]

Dom, in direct answer to your question, I will say that physical strength matters far less in handling a weapon than practice and familiarity with it. This is something your model is obviously lacking, since you seem opposed to allowing people below a certain body weight to pick up certain weapons in the first place. I'm 191cm and I would NOT consider that an advantage in handling some of the weapons depicted.

I wasn't aware that 191cm is a bodyweight. Height, weight, and bone structure all play into firearm usage though. There are certainly firearms that would be extremely difficult for somebody slender or slight to operate. I know, from my own personal experience, that women often have trouble handling large caliber handguns, which have a lot of recoil and are easier to operate if you have large meaty hands. With a rifle these problems become significantly less actually, because the weapon itself is braced against your body, so your bone structure is doing the majority of the work. Still there is a body weight factor, I've seen AK-47s almost put grown men right onto their backside, and if they didn't have the weight to brace against that, they would have fallen over.

In terms of efficacy familiarity is the most important thing, but there are limits on what a person can actually use.



I must say I'm impressed by the prominence of Black Rock Shooter examples in your image search, and must compliment you on your discerning taste, given that you apparently see it all the time and it's not the easiest Anime to find.

As for the rest, mostly falls squarely into the "Superhuman shooter" category or "Not actually an anime" or both (Hi! Arnage of Huckebein! Loved watching you get stonewalled by a textile merchant!).

Or is it possible you did a lazy image search again?

I thought you and IamNotTrevor said this was something you see all the time?

What exactly do you watch? And how does it effect your gaming that you feel you have to go online and complain about it? Do you ACTUALLY have to pass rules in your club against people playing Diece of the Numbers expys? If so, I envy your club.

It is certainly a trope. Although I'm not sure how common in it is. This is all however fairly pointless to the discussion. As far as I am aware, nobody has been discussing Anime based RPGs in this thread. Since in those RPGs you wouldn't want different stats for men and women, since that is not typically a convention of that genre. As such, not really pertinent to the discussion of how and why an RPG might include differing stats for men and for women, since you would want to do that in an RPG where that fits the genre conventions, or one aiming for hyper-realism.

[Jormengand]

It's far from helpful anyway, especially in a thread that's about HOW and WHY we should implement sex- or gender-based mechanical differences.

"Not at all" and "You shouldn't".

[AMFV]

"Not at all" and "You shouldn't".

That's a pretty blanket statement, without a lot of grounding. There are certainly cases when modelling physical differences has merit. Frozen Feet outlined some of them. In a setting where women fighters are by default not as effective, those that are will be remembered. We, after all, remember famous woman warriors literally hundreds and thousands of years after the fact. Male warriors tend to be forgotten on a much larger scale then they are remembered.

If I am going to have a degree of realism that would have body weight or what not playing into the game, then gender differences are something I should consider. Although again the matter depends largely on genre conventions. If we're going for standard D&D, there isn't much point to it. If we're going for Game Of Thrones, then maybe it's a more valid option, although even that has less developed issues there. If we're going for more grit than even that, then yes, there is a value to modelling it. And the how would depend on which game we're discussing.

[Jormengand]

If I am going to have a degree of realism that would have body weight or what not playing into the game, then gender differences are something I should consider. Although again the matter depends largely on genre conventions. If we're going for standard D&D, there isn't much point to it. If we're going for Game Of Thrones, then maybe it's a more valid option, although even that has less developed issues there. If we're going for more grit than even that, then yes, there is a value to modelling it. And the how would depend on which game we're discussing.

See, I keep on hearing this "Realism" argument and not buying it in the slightest. Realistic characters don't die pretty much instantly from a couple of rounds from a pistol (indeed, something like 95% of pistol wounds are not fatal), yet in D20 systems, first-level characters fall straight unconscious from average pistol damage. Not to mention that commoners can't identify other humans, animals, or much else, you can jump off a cliff and survive at high levels (not to mention be swallowed whole and be absolutely fine), but low-level characters can't reliably climb most things that you'd expect them to be able to even if they've trained extensively, and have a chance of failing to swim, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, you won't actually really notice the "Unrealism" of women being the same strength of men, because the idea of a strong woman is... not actually that uncommon.

If you want to make practically any game more realistic, there are so many things to focus on other than sexual dimorphism that singling out just that one says more about you than the game.

[Marlowe]

*SNIP*I agree with everything you've said. However, if somebody doesn't want to to get involved in tangential discussions, maybe they shouldn't make tangential snide comments.

The sneering use of the word "anime" offended me and the repeated uses of words like "Twiggy" in a certain persons posts offended me more. Especially since these people went on to demonstrate that they know nothing about any of the subjects in question.

EDIT: well, maybe not "offended" but these people just sound so ignorant it's annoying. Do they not understand that exaggeration-for-comedy-or-drama is a thing? Have they never heard of any style beyond naturalism? Are they aware that Naturalism is itself just a style that happens to be enforced by television because it's easy? Have they never seen Loonie Toons? Has any of these things impacted their games enough enough that they have to start complaining on-line?

And I am physically big enough, and JUST experienced enough, to know that physical size is of very little importance when dealing with a firearm. I don't understand why these people think it's such a big issue.

[AMFV]

See, I keep on hearing this "Realism" argument and not buying it in the slightest. Realistic characters don't die pretty much instantly from a couple of rounds from a pistol (indeed, something like 95% of pistol wounds are not fatal), yet in D20 systems, first-level characters fall straight unconscious from average pistol damage. Not to mention that commoners can't identify other humans, animals, or much else, you can jump off a cliff and survive at high levels (not to mention be swallowed whole and be absolutely fine), but low-level characters can't reliably climb most things that you'd expect them to be able to even if they've trained extensively, and have a chance of failing to swim, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, you won't actually really notice the "Unrealism" of women being the same strength of men, because the idea of a strong woman is... not actually that uncommon.

Which is exactly why I said that D20/3.5 D&D was NOT the system to use for that, it isn't designed to produce a realistic experience. Also while the pistol shot may not be fatal (thank you overquoted poorly written Cracked Article), the shock is very frequently fatal, and it will probably cause you to pass out. But yes D&D is not the system for this.



If you want to make practically any game more realistic, there are so many things to focus on other than sexual dimorphism that singling out just that one says more about you than the game.

And why should I choose not to also include sexual dimorphism if I am also including these other concepts? My thesis was that in a game where those other concepts were included, there is a substantive argument to make for also including the other.


I agree with everything you've said. However, if somebody doesn't want to to get involved in tangential discussions, maybe they shouldn't make tangential snide comments.

Fair enough



EDIT: well, maybe not "offended" but these people just sound so ignorant it's annoying. Do they not understand that exaggeration-for-comedy-or-drama is a thing? Have they never heard of any style beyond naturalism? Are they aware that Naturalism is itself just a style that happens to be enforced by television because it's easy? Have they never seen Loonie Toons? Has any of these things impacted their games enough enough that they have to start complaining on-line?


I dunno man, different things bother different people differently. I agree that genre conventions are the most important bit though, if you're trying to stay in-genre.



And I am physically big enough, and JUST experienced enough, to know that physical size is of very little importance when dealing with a firearm. I don't understand why these people think it's such a big issue.

Well, again it depends a great deal on what kind of firearm you're dealing with. I am quite experienced on the matter, and there are firearms where physical size can become more important (and those where it isn't),

[8BitNinja]

I see comments about how the game isn't designed for realism and just not add that in

Well this is a thread to see how to add it in, if you don't want to, don't

I think I might be repeating myself

[AMFV]

I see comments about how the game isn't designed for realism and just not add that in

Well this is a thread to see how to add it in, if you don't want to, don't

I think I might be repeating myself

Well my comments were that 3.5 D&D and D20 is not sufficiently granular to make that a good choice. A more realistic system certainly could involve that. There are many other systems.

[CharonsHelper]

Well my comments were that 3.5 D&D and D20 is not sufficiently granular to make that a good choice. A more realistic system certainly could involve that. There are many other systems.

I agree entirely.

I actually said "It [a game system] would of course need to be designed with that [male/female mechanical differences] in mind from the ground up." in the first post.

I think that some people need to work on their reading comprehension. :P

[Segev]

Such jokes would be stupid, because under my houserule girls don't suck at math, males are just somewhat better at it.Whether you like it or not, the "baseline" for "normal" in something is set by the average participant. If you have Elves be better at being Wizards, you will get more Elf Wizards than Human Wizards, and the "average" Wizard will conform to Elven traits. This will translate to "Humans are bad at Wizardry," because the average Wizard will be an Elf, who has bonuses to it, while the Human Wizards will be inferior to that. On average.

The same holds true for males, females, and bonuses or penalties to math.

If you make boys have "+2 to Math," then it will be assumed that the "baseline" is the boys' mathematical prowess. Girls, therefore, in comparison, "suck." If you make girls have "-2 to Math," the baseline, again, will be assumed to be the boys' superior prowess.

"Boys are better at math than girls" only translates to "girls suck at math" because there is no objective "okay at math" standard that is not based on looking at average performance of the very body you're trying to measure.


Any Wizard prc?I'm sure wizards get married as often as any other class, except perhaps clerics of religious orders with vows of celibacy. Or Paladins with similar vows.

[AMFV]

I'm sure wizards get married as often as any other class, except perhaps clerics of religious orders with vows of celibacy. Or Paladins with similar vows.

This is a tangent, but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate, being a wizard requires a lot more downtime activities that would make starting a relationship difficult. So I imagine that they don't have as easy a time with long-term relationships. Not that this would stop them from being able to do all sorts of short-term things.

[Donnadogsoth]

Dom, in direct answer to your question, I will say that physical strength matters far less in handling a weapon than practice and familiarity with it. This is something your model is obviously lacking, since you seem opposed to allowing people below a certain body weight to pick up certain weapons in the first place. I'm 191cm and I would NOT consider that an advantage in handling some of the weapons depicted.

I must say I'm impressed by the prominence of Black Rock Shooter examples in your image search, and must compliment you on your discerning taste, given that you apparently see it all the time and it's not the easiest Anime to find.

As for the rest, mostly falls squarely into the "Superhuman shooter" category or "Not actually an anime" or both (Hi! Arnage of Huckebein! Loved watching you get stonewalled by a textile merchant!).

Or is it possible you did a lazy image search again?

I thought you and IamNotTrevor said this was something you see all the time?

What exactly do you watch? And how does it effect your gaming that you feel you have to go online and complain about it? Do you ACTUALLY have to pass rules in your club against people playing Diece of the Numbers expys? If so, I envy your club.

My model? My model is that skill counts for a lot, but that physical strength also factors into using weapons, including guns. That factor will be in evidence if a small, thin individual, like an anime schoolgirl, is trying to use a Desert Eagle, for example. It doesn't matter if I've never seen that exact combination, there are girls with guns bigger than that, there are girls with guns smaller than that, somewhere on the continuum fits that. I don't see it "all the time" but have seen it enough to have noticed the trope.

Complaining? You're the one complaining. I'm inquiring as to what modifiers people should get in the use of firearms based on their physical strength. You seem to think zero, then you agree with AMFV, then who knows? Before you were getting bent out of shape over whether a woman who looks small and weak could be as strong as a much larger man and I demonstrated that they could--if they were elite weightlifters and looked the part. Now you want to make sure that small and weak anime girls can fire anything as well as the strongest soldier.

I'm saying that physical strength factors into using weapons, and that certain media products, whether they're "naturalistic" or not give us images of weapons use that, taken literally, don't square with reality. That's my observation as a casual anime viewer. I don't have to watch a lot of anime to see that, and I don't--you're obviously a more dedicated anime watcher than I am.

[AMFV]

My model? My model is that skill counts for a lot, but that physical strength also factors into using weapons, including guns. That factor will be in evidence if a small, thin individual, like an anime schoolgirl, is trying to use a Desert Eagle, for example. It doesn't matter if I've never seen that exact combination, there are girls with guns bigger than that, there are girls with guns smaller than that, somewhere on the continuum fits that. I don't see it "all the time" but have seen it enough to have noticed the trope.

Complaining? You're the one complaining. I'm inquiring as to what modifiers people should get in the use of firearms based on their physical strength. You seem to think zero, then you agree with AMFV, then who knows? Before you were getting bent out of shape over whether a woman who looks small and weak could be as strong as a much larger man and I demonstrated that they could--if they were elite weightlifters and looked the part. Now you want to make sure that small and weak anime girls can fire anything as well as the strongest soldier.

I'm saying that physical strength factors into using weapons, and that certain media products, whether they're "naturalistic" or not give us images of weapons use that, taken literally, don't square with reality. That's my observation as a casual anime viewer. I don't have to watch a lot of anime to see that, and I don't--you're obviously a more dedicated anime watcher than I am.

it's less a matter of strength than it is size and bone structure. Pistols is where you'll see the most difference. Rifles again are largely bone supported if you're shooting properly, so there wouldn't be so much of a difference.

[awa]

personally in regards to guns I imagine it would be less being strong makes you good at guns but that strength below a certain threshold makes you bad at guns. So you would just say this gun has a minimum str score of whatever and if you aren't strong enough you get penalties. Firing full auto would increase the required str and doing stuff like bracing the weapon either on an object or by changing your stance would give you bonuses to your effective str. I did something like this for a homebrew game and with the exception of one hiccup that needed a fix it worked well. (a player realized the penalty was only to hit so if you used a weapon with an area of effect dam that was opposed by a reff save it did not matter how big the penalty to hit is).

[AMFV]

personally in regards to guns I imagine it would be less being strong makes you good at guns but that strength below a certain threshold makes you bad at guns. So you would just say this gun has a minimum str score of whatever and if you aren't strong enough you get penalties. Firing full auto would increase the required str and doing stuff like bracing the weapon either on an object or by changing your stance would give you bonuses to your effective str. I did something like this for a homebrew game and with the exception of one hiccup that needed a fix it worked well. (a player realized the penalty was only to hit so if you used a weapon with an area of effect dam that was opposed by a reff save it did not matter how big the penalty to hit is).

Again it really matters what type of firearm, and how you're using it. A rifle is liable to be supported mostly by bone structure, so your strength isn't really the most relevant factor, outside of bracing so you don't fall backwards. You can't really fire a weapon on full auto without a tripod with really any modicum of accuracy (I mean you can get some, but it's far less effective).

Really the main weapon where a strength difference would be notable is with a pistol, where you don't have as much support.

[Donnadogsoth]

it's less a matter of strength than it is size and bone structure. Pistols is where you'll see the most difference. Rifles again are largely bone supported if you're shooting properly, so there wouldn't be so much of a difference.

Hmm. How would you systematise what you know of this matter? In whatever system you're familiar with. What strength levels (and sizes) give a penalty for firing a .45, an AK-47, or a 12-gauge? (or equivalents)

I'm coming from the perspective of Phoenix Command where lower STR leads to less of the action points which govern how quickly a gun can be aimed, but lower STR doesn't directly lead to a shot accuracy penalty. Skill governs recoil which slows subsequent aim time. Someone completely unskilled can effectively be knocked on their ass.

[AMFV]

Hmm. How would you systematise what you know of this matter? In whatever system you're familiar with. What strength levels give a penalty for firing a .45, an AK-47, or a 12-gauge? (or equivalents)

I'm coming from the perspective of Phoenix Command where lower STR leads to less of the action points which govern how quickly a gun can be aimed, but lower STR doesn't directly lead to a shot accuracy penalty. Skill governs recoil which slows subsequent aim time. Someone completely unskilled can effectively be knocked on their ass.

I don't think it really would be able to contribute to a system, it's way too complex and confusing. Also people who aren't intimately familiar with firearms are going to be very upset, because real life firearms don't work the way they do in movies. I would say that you're better sticking with genre conventions for that, since really the types of things that are most critical in firearms usage are not typically applied systematically in any role playing game at all (with the exception of skill). You might be able to manage some of it, but you'd need a very different style of game than any I've ever seen.

[Donnadogsoth]

I don't think it really would be able to contribute to a system, it's way too complex and confusing. Also people who aren't intimately familiar with firearms are going to be very upset, because real life firearms don't work the way they do in movies. I would say that you're better sticking with genre conventions for that, since really the types of things that are most critical in firearms usage are not typically applied systematically in any role playing game at all (with the exception of skill). You might be able to manage some of it, but you'd need a very different style of game than any I've ever seen.

Well, harrumph.

[SimonMoon6]

There are only three ways this can EVER be a good idea:
2) Prestige classes that that are only for one gender for flavor reasons, like vestigal virgins or a brotherhood like the freemasons.


There are already a few prestige classes for females only, like the one for the female worshipers of the nice drow deity, Eilistraeeiieaaiiieeiiaaiiee or whatever her name is. Too many vowels.

The only male-only prestige class I know of is "Eunuch Warlock".



Any other reason for to do this is a bad idea. While it's true that males tend to be stronger than females, ... so the difference between genders are small enough that they don't need to affect your stats.

Meh. It's, to me, the difference between pixies (women) and ogres (men). Give pixies and ogres the same stats? Sounds pretty weird to me, very lacking in verisimilitude. But maybe you're okay with that. Maybe teeny tiny pixies should punch as hard as ogres and big burly ogres should flit and flutter around the glade.


Is there a prestige class for male virgins? :smalltongue:

Maybe "Eunuch Warlock" if you snip him early enough.

[CharonsHelper]

I don't think it really would be able to contribute to a system, it's way too complex and confusing. Also people who aren't intimately familiar with firearms are going to be very upset, because real life firearms don't work the way they do in movies. I would say that you're better sticking with genre conventions for that, since really the types of things that are most critical in firearms usage are not typically applied systematically in any role playing game at all (with the exception of skill). You might be able to manage some of it, but you'd need a very different style of game than any I've ever seen.

I've seen a game where all weapons have 2 STR values, the higher for using one-handed, the lower for firing two-handed. You take a -2 penalty to hit for each point under the min. that you are. (weapons were in general categories like 'assault rifle', 'revolver', and 'battleaxe' - likely to avoid real-world arguments)

It was interesting because it allowed the brawniest higher level characters to wield submachine guns or greatswords one-handed with no penalty. It wasn't hard to implement because it was just something you checked when writing up your character sheet - like proficiencies are for other systems.

[AMFV]

Well, harrumph.

Sorry, I mean the most important aspects in shooting (breath control, and fine motor control) aren't usually modeled at all. Eyesight is typically comparable for virtually every single character and that's another factor.


I've seen a game where all weapons have 2 STR values, the higher for using one-handed, the lower for firing two-handed. You take a -2 penalty to hit for each point under the min. that you are. (weapons were in general categories like 'assault rifle', 'revolver', and 'battleaxe' - likely to avoid real-world arguments)

It was interesting because it allowed the brawniest higher level characters to wield submachine guns or greatswords one-handed with no penalty. It wasn't hard to implement because it was just something you checked when writing up your character sheet - like proficiencies are for other systems.

Eh, that's interesting, although that's more for super-fantasy stuff, since using a weapon one handed is typically completely different. I mean you can't really use an Assault Rifle 1-handed, you could shoot one that way, but you'd never hit anything with it, there's a reason people use weapons the way they do. Although if you're going for Rambo action movie scenes that could work.

[8BitNinja]

You could add something like men get more strength and constitution, but do something like

1) The aforementioned dexterity and charisma boost

2) Have women have a stronger magic aura but they get worse stats, so can better augment themselves via magic, similar to the Shadowrun Adepts

3) Make them really good at something other than combat, such as being able to make really good magic items or be able to spot things better (the better senses would be realistic, I cannot tell you how many times my mom easily found something I totally missed)

[CharonsHelper]

Eh, that's interesting, although that's more for super-fantasy stuff, since using a weapon one handed is typically completely different. I mean you can't really use an Assault Rifle 1-handed, you could shoot one that way, but you'd never hit anything with it, there's a reason people use weapons the way they do. Although if you're going for Rambo action movie scenes that could work.

Yeah - I think the requirement for one-handing an assault rifle and a few other weapons was set out of reach so that if a human did so there'd be at least a small penalty no matter how strong they were.

[JoeJ]

My model? My model is that skill counts for a lot, but that physical strength also factors into using weapons, including guns. That factor will be in evidence if a small, thin individual, like an anime schoolgirl, is trying to use a Desert Eagle, for example. It doesn't matter if I've never seen that exact combination, there are girls with guns bigger than that, there are girls with guns smaller than that, somewhere on the continuum fits that. I don't see it "all the time" but have seen it enough to have noticed the trope.

Complaining? You're the one complaining. I'm inquiring as to what modifiers people should get in the use of firearms based on their physical strength. You seem to think zero, then you agree with AMFV, then who knows? Before you were getting bent out of shape over whether a woman who looks small and weak could be as strong as a much larger man and I demonstrated that they could--if they were elite weightlifters and looked the part. Now you want to make sure that small and weak anime girls can fire anything as well as the strongest soldier.

I'm saying that physical strength factors into using weapons, and that certain media products, whether they're "naturalistic" or not give us images of weapons use that, taken literally, don't square with reality. That's my observation as a casual anime viewer. I don't have to watch a lot of anime to see that, and I don't--you're obviously a more dedicated anime watcher than I am.

I don't know that much about anime, but in actual competitive shooting in the U.S. women frequently compete alongside and against men. And on average, they seem to win matches about in proportion to their numbers.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I will not be responding to any arguments which boil down to "but random generation is bad because muh character concept." Again: I have years of convention GMing experience using randomly generated and pregenerated characters. They have not proven to be crippling flaws of game design and you'd have to be a wizard to convince me otherwise.

I would, but I randomly generated an intelligence of 6!

On a more serious note: good points, I bow to your superior argument on gender bonuses.

I still don't think I'm using them anytime soon, but I have to agree: they can add something to the game. If the setting and the group allow what they add to become more fun than what they take it's a good or at least not a bad concept.

[AMFV]

I don't know that much about anime, but in actual competitive shooting in the U.S. women frequently compete alongside and against men. And on average, they seem to win matches about in proportion to their numbers.

I believe the tone of the complaints wasn't women using rifles or light pistols (which are what is typically used in shooting matches), but women using M2s or 240G without any support one handed (something that men can't do either notably), or that sort of thing. To be fair except for specific calibers of pistols, and larger weapons, women tend to perform about as well as men do. Once you start getting into having to carry 100+ lbs of weapon though, then there are some issues, or weapons where you really have to put serious pressure on it to keep it from going some place (larger Machineguns), those would be where you might see a sex based difference. Otherwise women are pretty equal with weapons.

[ThinkMinty]

Meh. It's, to me, the difference between pixies (women) and ogres (men). Give pixies and ogres the same stats? Sounds pretty weird to me, very lacking in verisimilitude. But maybe you're okay with that. Maybe teeny tiny pixies should punch as hard as ogres and big burly ogres should flit and flutter around the glade.

Somehow this manages to demean both pixies and ogres. Your suspension of disbelief must be broken every time you watch an ogre's Olympic gymnastics event or whenever pixies go bowling.


Sexual dimorphism is more complicated than "durr, women are physically inferior", especially when you account for individual traits of individual beings, or you look outside of h. sapiens sapiens to study it as a phenomenon.

Also, the snide dismissal of tiny ladies being ridiculously strong in fictional settings as anime nonsense ignores (among others) Pippi Longstocking, Molly Hayes, the Powerpuff Girls...plus it sounds like you're sayin' a whole medium is objectively bad when that's a subjective opinion.

I'm with Jor on this. The Mars-Venus stuff just makes both genders look like incompatible alien assjacks. Gendered crunch is going to turn a pretty huge chunk of the playerbase away from whatever it is, regardless of which gender gets the shaft.

In a discussion of how to do it, bringing up reasons not to do it are within the scope of the discussion, since extra limits based on clichéd sexism might not be everyone's interpretation of a good idea that adds fun to a game.

[8BitNinja]

Now the argument has shifted to what stats to do or do not

[AMFV]

Sexual dimorphism is more complicated than "durr, women are physically inferior", especially when you account for individual traits of individual beings, or you look outside of h. sapiens sapiens to study it as a phenomenon.

This is true, but the fact that women are smaller and are generally not as good at a specific set of tasks, is pretty much across the board. It only sucks when those tasks are things that would be vital for adventuring. There are reasons why women do not compete directly against men in almost any sports. Now I'm not saying that it isn't more complex than that, but I'm saying that the most significant difference that would be something that might affect an RPG is that. Other differences aren't as liable to come up.



Also, the snide dismissal of tiny ladies being ridiculously strong in fictional settings as anime nonsense ignores (among others) Pippi Longstocking, Molly Hayes, the Powerpuff Girls...plus it sounds like you're sayin' a whole medium is objectively bad when that's a subjective opinion.

I agree with all you folks on this, genre considerations are critical in fantasy. If I'm playing a game based on anime, then I expect my waif girl to be able to do the things that we see in anime (I don't watch enough to be really sure). If I'm playing a superhero game, then even my unpowered female character, should be able to beat multiple guys in unarmed combat. The thing is, though, that it isn't realistic, I would call it an acceptable break from reality, but I'm not sure that opinion is universal.



I'm with Jor on this. The Mars-Venus stuff just makes both genders look like incompatible alien assjacks. Gendered crunch is going to turn a pretty huge chunk of the playerbase away from whatever it is, regardless of which gender gets the shaft.

Well the playerbase for a game that's crunchy enough to make that sort of inclusion worthwhile, isn't probably going to be driven away by that. I mean in D&D it's not, so we're talking a much more realistic system, and people are going to expect things like that, in that sort of system.



In a discussion of how to do it, bringing up reasons not to do it are within the scope of the discussion, since extra limits based on clichéd sexism might not be everyone's interpretation of a good idea that adds fun to a game.

What if those limits aren't based on "cliched sexism" but rather on demonstrable physical differences?

[Donnadogsoth]

I don't know that much about anime, but in actual competitive shooting in the U.S. women frequently compete alongside and against men. And on average, they seem to win matches about in proportion to their numbers.

Are all categories of small arms included?

If strength does, after all, have some role to play in effectively using small arms, do you suppose the women are self-selected to be strong enough to manage said arms? Would very weak people, whether men, women, or children, be able, do you think, to win matches about in proportion to their numbers? (assuming same skill levels)

[AMFV]

Are all categories of small arms included?

If strength does, after all, have some role to play in effectively using small arms, do you suppose the women are self-selected to be strong enough to manage said arms? Would very weak people, whether men, women, or children, be able, do you think, to win matches about in proportion to their numbers? (assuming same skill levels)

Depends on what exactly you're classing as "small arms", it's typically long rifles and pistols, of varying calibers, and most people could certainly handle most of those. I mean you probably wouldn't see a woman competing with a 1911, but then again that's a bad gun for most ladies as is.

[JoeJ]

Are all categories of small arms included?

If strength does, after all, have some role to play in effectively using small arms, do you suppose the women are self-selected to be strong enough to manage said arms? Would very weak people, whether men, women, or children, be able, do you think, to win matches about in proportion to their numbers? (assuming same skill levels)

Generally not handheld grenade launchers or machine guns, but the full range of pistols, rifles, and shotguns.

In all sports, competitors are self-selected to be strong, fast, agile, tough, etc. enough to be effective. That's always a given. In shooting, however, strength does not play a major role. Even recoil management is related more to skill than raw strength.

One thing that does play a role is the size; especially the size of the shooter's hands for handguns and the length of the arms for long arms. Using a gun that is too big for you to hold properly makes it nearly impossible to shoot effectively. Competitive shooters generally use their own guns during matches, however, so this is not usually a significant factor in the competition.

[gadren]

I don't really see the upside to penalizing females. I mean, if that's what your group likes, do whatever you want, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I have run a game years ago where female humans and halflings had the option of taking a -2 to str in exchange for a +2 to cha to reflect that sorcerous blood ran more strongly in them, and even that elicited some complaints (that I can understand in retrospect.)

[Mr Beer]

Hmm. How would you systematise what you know of this matter? In whatever system you're familiar with. What strength levels (and sizes) give a penalty for firing a .45, an AK-47, or a 12-gauge? (or equivalents)

I'm coming from the perspective of Phoenix Command where lower STR leads to less of the action points which govern how quickly a gun can be aimed, but lower STR doesn't directly lead to a shot accuracy penalty. Skill governs recoil which slows subsequent aim time. Someone completely unskilled can effectively be knocked on their ass.

GURPS, because GURPS is awesome, has rules regarding minimum ST scores required to use any given weapon without suffering a penalty. Most normal firearms require ST 10 (average) or ST 11.

[Donnadogsoth]

Generally not handheld grenade launchers or machine guns, but the full range of pistols, rifles, and shotguns.

In all sports, competitors are self-selected to be strong, fast, agile, tough, etc. enough to be effective. That's always a given. In shooting, however, strength does not play a major role. Even recoil management is related more to skill than raw strength.

One thing that does play a role is the size; especially the size of the shooter's hands for handguns and the length of the arms for long arms. Using a gun that is too big for you to hold properly makes it nearly impossible to shoot effectively. Competitive shooters generally use their own guns during matches, however, so this is not usually a significant factor in the competition.

The jury here seems to be in that strength is a lesser factor than skill in handling firearms. As I wrote earlier, Phoenix Command accounts for as much. Okay, my hypothesis is on the ropes.

Now I'm hearing size is a very significant factor—can anyone tell me more about size's relationship to marksmanship? Can anyone systematise it, in any reasonably crunchy system, in other words?

And, can disproportionately high strength partially compensate for a small size when using firearms?


GURPS, because GURPS is awesome, has rules regarding minimum ST scores required to use any given weapon without suffering a penalty. Most normal firearms require ST 10 (average) or ST 11.

GURPS is awesome. Not as awesome as Phoenix Command, but it is awesome I'll grant you that.

That said, does GURPS lump size and strength together and call them ST? Because we seem to be disentangling size from strength in this thread and the consensus so far, your post aside, is that strength bears little on gun use provided one can even lift the weapon in the first place. Size would relate to being able to grip the thing and hold it (a rifle, say) up and steady, which would be hard to do if one's arms aren't long enough to achieve the proper grip.

[Mr Beer]

That said, does GURPS lump size and strength together and call them ST? Because we seem to be disentangling size from strength in this thread and the consensus so far, your post aside, is that strength bears little on gun use provided one can even lift the weapon in the first place. Size would relate to being able to grip the thing and hold it (a rifle, say) up and steady, which would be hard to do if one's arms aren't long enough to achieve the proper grip.

GURPS generally associates ST with size and mass, but they are independent of each other. For purposes of humans using guns, you would use ST for RAW purposes and so if you had a ST 15 waif, she would be able to use heavier weapons than a ST 14 huge grunt.

[JoeJ]

Now I'm hearing size is a very significant factor—can anyone tell me more about size's relationship to marksmanship? Can anyone systematise it, in any reasonably crunchy system, in other words?

That would be very hard to do, because it's only the size of certain body parts that matter, and only in relationship to certain firearms. Generally, people with short arms have a hard time shooting many standard rifles and shotguns, which is why so many long guns these days either come with an adjustable stock or have one available as an aftermarket part. People with small hands have difficulty firing large handguns. Based on my wife's experience, the width of the grip seems to be a deciding factor; she loves shooting my .45 cal. M1911, but can't handle my 9mm XD(M) because it has a double stack magazine, which makes the grip too big. I don't think there's any system detailed enough to actually model that.

[goto124]

I have run a game years ago where female humans and halflings had the option of taking a -2 to str in exchange for a +2 to cha to reflect that sorcerous blood ran more strongly in them, and even that elicited some complaints (that I can understand in retrospect.)

Ooooo, race and sex crisscrossing! I wonder if they would be more alright with it if it were, say, elves and halflings instead?

[gadren]

Ooooo, race and sex crisscrossing! I wonder if they would be more alright with it if it were, say, elves and halflings instead?

The problem is that even when it is attached to an explanation that has nothing to do with that, even giving the option (and an often beneficial one at that) for women to effectively be weaker but more charming and prettier seems like a play to sexist cliches of what a woman should be.

[goto124]

So, if we want sexual dimorphism we should go for less cliche stuff, such as spiders (females are larger & tankier, males are smaller and more dexterous) or other non-human species.


The Mars-Venus stuff just makes both genders look like incompatible alien assjacks. Gendered crunch is going to turn a pretty huge chunk of the playerbase away from whatever it is, regardless of which gender gets the shaft.

Now, to design an entire setting where men and women really are as different as Mars and Venus *nodnod*

[PersonMan]

I feel like, in a fantasy setting, it'd be easy enough to make a justification for a super-strong but low-muscled PC that changing the rules would be more work, rather than less.

"How is your 5' 8", 102 pound character lifting their bodyweight as a light load?"

1: "Well, as part of their tribe's coming of age ritual, they are marked with massive tattoos that bind the spirits of their ancestors to them, giving them incredible strength and fortitude even if they are small in stature."

2: "They don't know, but an old family legend says that three generations ago a young man sold his soul to a devil in exchange for making his bloodline 'fair and fierce'; ever since then the family has been full of unusually strong men and women."

3: "Growing up as a street urchin, they had the dubious fortune of being relegated to a few alleyways behind a wizard's workshop by the stronger kids. Eating scraps soaked in arcane solutions have had various effects, one of them being a rapid increase in strength a few years back. They also stopped growing early, even when they got more to eat."

[Frozen_Feet]

@Jormengand:

Your line of reasoning reminds me of many arguments against no or low magic d20 games: "oh no, you can't do that, because the system assumes you have magic items."

Except, it's trivial for a GM to cherry pick monsters which don't need magic to deal with them. So the argument assumes either that 1) the GM is a blind idiot who somehow won't remove high fantasy monsters from his low fantasy game, or 2) the GM is evil and out to stealth-nerf player characters.

You "not buying the realism argument" is the same. You're assuming a double standard, where a GM will selectively make one aspect of the game more realistic while ignoring all others. In practice, if a GM is worrying about realistic sexual dimorphism, then it's safe to assume they will make other parts of the game closer to reality as well.

The reason we're not talking about those other parts is because the thread title is "Males & Females with different stats" and those other parts are not the topic of the day. Saying "you can't invoke realism because other parts are unrealistic!" Is both "But dragons!" fallacy as well as, for this thread, moving the goal posts.

---

The above is also why I've not addressed the "oversized guns" tangent priorly. If I'm banning oversized weapons for women because they couldn't realistically lift those, I will be banning those for men for the same reason. And vice versa: if I'm playing a game with Pippi Longstockings or Powerpuff girls in it, I'm not going to limit characters due to realism, because military realism is obviously not the genre we're playing.

The whole tangent seems to be grounded on the assumption that a break in reality is only allowed to one sex, and the reason is again either idiotism or malevolence on the part of the GM. (Rather than, say, playing a game parodying B action movie tropes, for contrast.)

As a point of tangentially related trivia, there are games like Phoenix Command and Twilight which do go in depth about workings and effects of firearms. And the longest-running convention campaign (20 years and running, over two hundred players IIRC) in Finland is based on such games. So, for everyone, it might be healthy to check assumptions of what level of realism you can do and still get a crowd of players.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

(Rather than, say, playing a game parodying B action movie tropes, for contrast.)

Males can fire weapons 10 times as heavy as females, but if a female fires a gun while back flipping they get a +2 to both accuracy and damage. Also, they permanently lose their limitation on weapon weight if in the final act all male characters become incapacitated in some manner.

[goto124]

I could embrace gender-based rules if they were more like B action movie tropes :smalltongue:

[Segev]

I could embrace gender-based rules if they were more like B action movie tropes :smalltongue:

So Bruce Campbell gets a +2 bonus to Str and Cha for having a female leg accessory equipped?


*ducks and RUNS*

[goto124]

You'll need to be playing Bruce Campbell in the first place, which seems rather specific, so... :smalltongue:

[Donnadogsoth]

That would be very hard to do, because it's only the size of certain body parts that matter, and only in relationship to certain firearms. Generally, people with short arms have a hard time shooting many standard rifles and shotguns, which is why so many long guns these days either come with an adjustable stock or have one available as an aftermarket part. People with small hands have difficulty firing large handguns. Based on my wife's experience, the width of the grip seems to be a deciding factor; she loves shooting my .45 cal. M1911, but can't handle my 9mm XD(M) because it has a double stack magazine, which makes the grip too big. I don't think there's any system detailed enough to actually model that.

Create a SIZ stat on 3-18 scale like the others, like that used in Call of Cthulhu, concentrating on height with bulk and weight a lesser factor. Say 10 is average American man (5'9", 175 lbs), 18 is a tall male basketball player (7'7", 300 lbs), 1 is a halfling (3', 30 lbs). Anime girls would be around SIZ 5-6. SIZ gives modifiers to Aim Time for long guns and oversize pistols (for Phoenix Command, how much time it takes to bring a weapon to bear and aim it), but this can be translated into other systems as a to-hit modifier. For long, apelike arms add 1-2 points to SIZ for firing purposes.

SIZ.....Mod
1........-4, need at least a bipod to use effectively
2........-3
3-4.....-2
5-6.....-1
7-17....0
18-19..-1
20-21...-2
22-25...-3
26+......Cannot use

Adapted from ideas courtesy of the PCCS mailing list.

[Segev]

You'll need to be playing Bruce Campbell in the first place, which seems rather specific, so... :smalltongue:

You know, I bet you that an RPG whose premise is that the players are all playing Bruce Campbell would be oddly popular.

[CharonsHelper]

You know, I bet you that an RPG whose premise is that the players are all playing Bruce Campbell would be oddly popular.

Grooooovvyyyy

[Wardog]

Now, to design an entire setting where men and women really are as different as Mars and Venus *nodnod*

Males are small and cold, and females get a boiling acid as a breath weapon?

[Lacco]

So Bruce Campbell gets a +2 bonus to Str and Cha for having a female leg accessory equipped?


*ducks and RUNS*

I wouldn't say.

I would give him +2 to hit/damage if he sticks out his ching though. And his one-liners could be used as a breath weapon... :smallbiggrin:

[Zale]

Males are small and cold, and females get a boiling acid as a breath weapon?

This is the only good idea I've actually seen come out of this thread.

[AMFV]

Create a SIZ stat on 3-18 scale like the others, like that used in Call of Cthulhu, concentrating on height with bulk and weight a lesser factor. Say 10 is average American man (5'9", 175 lbs), 18 is a tall male basketball player (7'7", 300 lbs), 1 is a halfling (3', 30 lbs). Anime girls would be around SIZ 5-6. SIZ gives modifiers to Aim Time for long guns and oversize pistols (for Phoenix Command, how much time it takes to bring a weapon to bear and aim it), but this can be translated into other systems as a to-hit modifier. For long, apelike arms add 1-2 points to SIZ for firing purposes.

SIZ.....Mod
1........-4, need at least a bipod to use effectively
2........-3
3-4.....-2
5-6.....-1
7-17....0
18-19..-1
20-21...-2
22-25...-3
26+......Cannot use

Adapted from ideas courtesy of the PCCS mailing list.

Eh, it's still not a very good explanation for it, since it's not just one kind of size. I'm 5'6", I've never had trouble using any weapon, because I have a large frame, and very beefy strong hands. So being short doesn't hurt me as much as being slight might.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think in the abstract world of an RPG strength, or maybe even constitution, works fine for setting minimum requirements for some weapons. A big pistol with a thick grip and an oversized rifle with large recoil will generally be useable by roughly the same people. their requirements are completely different, but the folks with the big hands and strong arms will often also be the ones with the sturdy shoulders, large mass and good core muscles. If you do not want to use strength or con you can use a specially made size stat. It has both an advantage and disadvantage in that it doesn't change throughout the game, so your character doesn't suddenly grow bigger hands, but also doesn't gain muscles with which to more effectively counter recoil. Using height or even weight as an indication for how big characters in each category are is fine I think, if your character is short but stocky with large hands just rate him a bit higher than his length would suggest. Just look at the weapons listed for all requirements and say "She can effectively use large handguns and sniper rifles but not light machine guns, so she's size X. I'll write up a description to support that notion." That is, of course, if you want to go into these kind of details in the first place.

[Satinavian]

Eh, it's still not a very good explanation for it, since it's not just one kind of size. I'm 5'6", I've never had trouble using any weapon, because I have a large frame, and very beefy strong hands. So being short doesn't hurt me as much as being slight might.
If strength is even less important than size, it would probably better to not restrict firearms at all for everyone human-sized. Even systems that do track size don't do so for every body part, so "small with big hands" is pretty much out. And then we have things like adjustable stocks that would make arm size modifiers practically irrelevant anyway as people tend to use their personal weapons most of the time.

[Donnadogsoth]

Eh, it's still not a very good explanation for it, since it's not just one kind of size. I'm 5'6", I've never had trouble using any weapon, because I have a large frame, and very beefy strong hands. So being short doesn't hurt me as much as being slight might.

Like I as much said, it's not a big problem. Just say you have +2 effective SIZ. The threshold given for using any weapon without a penalty was 7 anyway, which 5'6" should fit.

[AMFV]

Like I as much said, it's not a big problem. Just say you have +2 effective SIZ. The threshold given for using any weapon without a penalty was 7 anyway, which 5'6" should fit.

But the issue is that even size of one type isn't the only factor, effective usage of a weapons system is substantively more complex than that. Too complicated to likely model very well.

[Donnadogsoth]

But the issue is that even size of one type isn't the only factor, effective usage of a weapons system is substantively more complex than that. Too complicated to likely model very well.

[shrug] the relevant skill covers many sins. And if the factors spiral off into infinity then the chaos of the dice will have to eat them.

[JoeJ]

I wouldn't do this because it's way too fiddly, but if you really want to deal with size, I'd suggest for rifles and shotguns, firing a weapon that's too small would give you a minor penalty to hit. One that's too big would give a major penalty. If the weapon has an adjustable stock, it can be adjusted anywhere within its range in a matter of a few seconds. When you buy a rifle or shotgun at a store or gun show, if the seller is even slightly competent they'll help you find a gun that you can hold and shoot comfortably.

For recoil, remember that it increases with increasing charge in the ammunition and decreases with increasing mass of the gun. So a heavy gun will kick less than a light one firing the same ammo.

[CharonsHelper]

For recoil, remember that it increases with increasing charge in the ammunition and decreases with increasing mass of the gun. So a heavy gun will kick less than a light one firing the same ammo.

If you're going that in-depth - the gun can change how loud the ammo is too. I know that my .22 rifle is barely more than a *pop*, but I need to wear hearing protection for my .22 pistol.

Of course - I think that the whole thing breaks the KISS rule WAAAAYYY too hard and isn't worth keeping track of.

[JoeJ]

If you're going that in-depth - the gun can change how loud the ammo is too. I know that my .22 rifle is barely more than a *pop*, but I need to wear hearing protection for my .22 pistol.

Of course - I think that the whole thing breaks the KISS rule WAAAAYYY too hard and isn't worth keeping track of.

And to get even fussier, semi- and fully automatic small arms generally work by using some of the recoil energy to chamber the next round so they'll have slightly less kick than other types of action.

But I agree, this is FAR too fiddly to be any fun for me in a game.

[AMFV]

And to get even fussier, semi- and fully automatic small arms generally work by using some of the recoil energy to chamber the next round so they'll have slightly less kick than other types of action.

But I agree, this is FAR too fiddly to be any fun for me in a game.

And then you'd have the difference between rifles with buffer springs, and rifles without. Weapons that are entirely recoil powered. There's way too much fiddlyness, although playing a gun simulator could be fun, if you could get a computer to do most of the modeling.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

although playing a gun simulator could be fun, if you could get a computer to do most of the modeling.

"I fire my rifle!"

- "Computer says no."

[8BitNinja]

Well, I just got back on and I hear all this talk of guns

now this is a conversation I can contribute to :smallsmile:

[JohnnyCancer]

The CRPG Arcanum gave male characters a bonus to Strength and female characters a bonus to their Endurance. Or maybe they got higher caps to those attributes, hard to remember after so many years.