How much, if any, of Appendix N passes the Bechdel Test?

[InvisibleBison]

You're right, I missed a step explaining this.

Let's try again: the fact that there's a wide range of examples from all over the world, all across history and in various genres means that when someone engaged in motivated reasoning goes cherry-picking for examples, they're almost bound to find something that fits their idea of why a thing exists now. This allows for creating superficially well-founded arguments that nonetheless fail to be useful.

That still doesn't connect your premise to your conclusion. You still haven't explained why this wide range of examples makes attempts to evaluate the Girdle almost always fall victim to motivated reasoning.

[Pauly]

The Bechdel test is like
- the real physics test
- the historical accuracy test
- the proper grammar test
- the economic simulation test
Or any other artificial test you want to apply to a work of fiction.

It is only important to people who want to care about those things, but whether or not a work passes any one of these arbitrary tests is irrelevant. The real tests are
- dud you enjoy the work?
- do a sufficient number of other people also enjoy the work?

[InvisibleBison]

It is only important to people who want to care about those things

How tautological. Of course only people who care about something will care about that thing.

but whether or not a work passes any one of these arbitrary tests is irrelevant. The real tests are
- dud you enjoy the work?
- do a sufficient number of other people also enjoy the work?

Not so. It can be helpful/interesting/enjoyable to think about why you enjoyed or didn't enjoy a work, and why other people did or did not share your opinion. Looking purely at whether a work is enjoyable is far from the only meaningful method of analysis.

[2D8HP]

Eyes nodded too and said dreamily, "Blue skies and rippling water, spotless beach, a tepid wind, flowers and slim slavegirls everywhere…"
Nemia said, "I've always wished for a place that has no weather, only perfection. Do you know which half of Ilthmar's kingdom has the least weather?"
"Precious Nemia," Eyes murmured, "you're so civilized. And so very, very clever. Next to one other, you're certainly the best thief in Lankhmar."
"Who's the other?" Nemia was eager to know.
"Myself, of course," Eyes answered modestly.
Nemia reached up and tweaked her companion's ear — not too painfully, but enough.
"If there were the least money depending on that," she said quietly but firmly, "I'd teach you differently. But since it's only conversation…"
"Dearest Nemia."
"Sweetest Eyes."
The two girls gently embraced and kissed each other fondly

Passes “Bechdel test”, is among the ‘Appendix N’ works.

If I bother to dig it up another such conversation may be found in Leiber’s “The Mouser Goes Below”from The Knight and Knave of Swords (but while in the same series was published after the DMG)

[Yakk]

The "Bechdel test" isn't really about specific works. It is an insanely low bar to pass, and the point is a huge percent of works don't pass that bar.

When the gender-swapped Bechdel test meanwhile is passed by almost every work in a collection, and the Bechdel test itself fails on almost every work, and the collection wasn't chosen based off of Bechdel test passing or not (directly), it tells you stuff about that collection.

[gbaji]

To specifically target players, you would have to make a specific character don the girdle which seems pretty unlikely. Also i would not say that it has ever been good practice to change a PC by force to get the player to play something else.

Correct. That would be pretty unlikely. It would just occasionally be tossed in and whomever chose to wear it was the person who would deal with it. Having said that, girdles/belts tended to be items that fighter type characters wore (most of them have effects most useful to melee classes at least), and to whatever degree old school stereotypes may exist with regards to male players (mostly) focusing on their "big strong male" fighter types, this would tend to fall on them more often than other character classes.

Again though the degree to which this was a "punishment" or a problem at all was entirely the degree to which the players themselves were stuck in rigid concepts about sexual roles (and roleplaying). Dunno. It was just never that big of a deal on the super rare occasions it ever came up. I've never played at a table where players had any issue at all with playing characters of different sex than themselves, so this was just kind of a "oh, huh. my character is now <X>", followed by that player roleplaying the character with their new sex. Which sometimes could create even more roleplaying opportunities if said character was in a relationship with another PC or NPC. They'd have to decide how that character would react to the change, and move from there.

All are valid (and IMO valuable) roleplaying opportunities.

What are you basing that idea on, that it was meant as a tool for roleplaying? Because I can find no citation that supports that claim, and seeing as it was a cursed item, and most cursed items existed to trick or punish players for not being cautious enough (most cursed items deliberately resemble other, non cursed magical items), I'm not sure I buy that its intended purpose by Gygax was to 'encourage roleplaying.'

I don't recall if I said it was "meant as a tool for roleplaying", but that it was "used as a tool for roleplaying". I guess that somewhat of a trend I'm trying to get across. What a game designer intended when writing the game, rules, items, or even reading list, aren't as relevant as what the players did with those things. What Gygax intended doesn't matter. What the players (and GMs) did with the items/whatever is.

And overwhelmingly, in my experience, items like that were used as roleplaying opportunities by the players. Somewhat forced opportunities, but one could argue that of many "cursed" items. Having your alignment changed was also primarily about having to roleplay your character differently than intended, right? That one though, actually could have some significant class conflicts.

Also, you are wrong about it having no mechanical effect. In 1E, women had STR caps on them originally. So if you were a man with a high enough STR and put on the girdle, you would have your STR permanently lowered.

A lot of people just ignored the sex restrictions on stats anyway. Heck. We ignored half the tables in the original game. I guess that also falls into the "how people played vs what the game designers wrote".

Even among those who did enforce those restrictions on sex based on strength (or any character facet based on stats), those were on the initial roll up. If something changed later, you could keep it and just played through. I think most DMs (if they used the sex restriction at all) would not cap strength as a result of a girdle caused sex change. I'm pretty sure a female character could wear a girdle of storm giant strength and wasn't capped on that either, so why in this case? Again. Details a bit fuzzy though. I can't recall this situation ever actually coming up though.

if your Orc's charisma rose above a 14 did you stop being an orc? I don't think so. I suppose it's possible that if a paladin fell below a 17 charisma, they might lose their paladin abilities? It's been a really really long time since I played 1e. There were a lot of oddities in the game back then, and a heck of a lot of house ruling to get around them. Which may be why I tend towards talking about how the players played the game more than what oddities were in the original rules. Looking back and scanning the rules and declaring "this was sooo wrong", fails when pretty much everyone back in the day also saw those things as wrong and changed them when they played.

And again, I find it odd because my experience playing was that most players were so much more open to exploring different characters and roles than it seems they are today. I literally never recall running into a single player back in late 70s through mid 90s (which is about when I stopped playing outside of my own smallish gaming group) that had problems with roleplaying different/any sex characters. It really does seem as though newer/younger players are more sensitive/bothered by this today than the old school players were back then.

Could just be me and my experience is the exception. Not sure.