Gender, Settings, Mechanics, and Everything Else

[ExploderWizard]

FWIW, I'm debating the whole thing because, in my experience, the fact that there is no gender difference/bias in a campaign world is a huge blow to credibility in my mind - since it's something that our society STILL grapples with. To not have it there, yet have a setting where slavery can exist, there are serfs on the land, etc, just blows any credibility out of the water.

And again I'm saying that the type of game is important to consider. A fighter surviving a cliff dive onto solid rock already blows away credible reality. Slavery and serfdom don't have to exist in a fantasy world either. We can incorporate bits and pieces of human experience that we want to play with and leave the rest (like your salad bar ).

 

[KahnyaGnorc]

The only times I had stat variances with genders are:

-when males and females are so different that I simply stat them out as different races (like in the case of an amazonian race)

-The was an elven culture I made that had, in the past, allowed completely-unrestrained experimentation with magic, which allowed them to essentially mutate their race. At the time of the unfettered magic, they were sexist and thought that only males should be mages, so the mutation increased males' INT and females' CON.

-A couple settings, I used the concept of "favored stat." This wasn't a +/- to a stat, but instead made it easier to increase the stat (cheaper in a point-buy system). A few races had different favored stats based on gender roles (CON for male dwarves, WIS for female dwarves).

Those who break gender roles usually are just looked at funny (and can often put someone off-guard, taking advantage of their preconceived notions). However, there may be some sexist NPCs about (of both genders).

 

[Greg K]

I was thinking of allowing only females to be priests for one of the main religions in a setting I'm working on

I did this for my home brew. I replaced the monk with a slightly modified OA Shaman. This class was an order within the clergy of a specific deity and membership was only open to females.

I wanted to have a bunch of other situations where genders were defined, and set it up in such a way that female players could challenge those situations should they so please.

While some mechanics might be purely fluff (for example, if I said only males could be sailors, it might make sense to prevent female players from starting with the "sailor" class or whatever)

I think this cool. You can have the female character that disguised herself as a guy and served on a crew. You might even have a legendary female captain that is respected with a dedicated crew and, yet, have the majority of sailors still wary to sail with her.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

One of the reasons that I like multiple cultures--or organizations or even individuals--as a basis for expressing such conflict, is that you can afford to be strong enough at those levels for it to matter.

If the whole campaign world is set around the man keeping the good woman in the house, then that is inevitably what the campaign is about. Well, inevitable if the players confront it, anyway. None of us, not even the ladies that would like to sometimes put some macho dude in his place, want a campaign about gender roles. OTOH, if you start watering it down to the point that the campaign isn't about that, then the satisfaction goes away too. Turns out macho dude was all bluff, had no power, etc.

It is as if you had ask me if the players wanted to smite the big bad evil guy, and when I answered that they did, you wanted to know what I thought of having a world running rampant with evil guys? My answer is that I want my evil guy to stand out in the world, to be worth smiting, and to have that contrast, something else has to be there. A world without built in gender differences makes any perceived gender differences present really stark.

 

[S'mon]

In a game where a fighter can fall from an 80 foot drop and just get up and keep walking I don't think that I could take stat adjustments just for little naughty bit differences seriously.

'Normal people' in 3e have 1-4 hit points, possibly 6-8 for Experts and Warriors. They'll typically be killed by a 30' drop.

I distinguish between normal people and PCs/heroes, the latter (a) are statted differently and (b) at high level can survive 80' drops.

 

[Umbran]

In a fairly simulationist game like 3e D&D, I'll give typical human males average STR 10-11, typical human females average STR 6-7, which roughly corresponds to IRL differences in most of what the STR stat models.

Without going into the details, I'll just say that based upon that, I am not sure I agree with you on what Strength models, and possibly what the real-world differences between the male and female strength distributions are, and why.

And, if you are giving typical pseudo-medieval women a strength of 6 or 7, I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of physical exertion in the lives of such people. You might have an argument that modern couch-potato and office-worker women might have that low a strength, but not in a world without machinery to pump your water and haul things around for you.

That aside, I approach the issue differently. Rather than place an arbitrary cap based on gender, I say an NPC will generally have stats to suit their job/role in society. If I want a particular NPC to have special characteristics for some reason, I'll vary up or down from that.

So, the town sage will be smart, the pickpocket will be dextrous, and the blacksmith will be strong, no matter their gender - because if they didn't have those stats, they wouldn't last long in those roles. That pushes the question into the society, rather than an arbitrary rule. If the society has a bias such that women don't perform hard-labor jobs as often, then the NPC women will tend to have lower strength.

 

[S'mon]

Without going into the details, I'll just say that based upon that, I am not sure I agree with you on what Strength models, and possibly what the real-world differences between the male and female strength distributions are, and why.

And, if you are giving typical pseudo-medieval women a strength of 6 or 7, I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of physical exertion in the lives of such people. You might have an argument that modern couch-potato and office-worker women might have that low a strength, but not in a world without machinery to pump your water and haul things around for you.

I'm starting from STR 10 being the average active human male (eg medieval farmer); in that context the average active human female will have STR 7. IRL when men and women engage in similar physical activity, the strength disparity increases, not decreases. The US military reckon that m-f upper body strength disparity increases from around 70% to around 100% after basic trainining, AIR - which equates in 3e to a change from a ca 3 point STR disparity to a 4 point STR disparity, if STR is taken to be mostly upper-body strength; there is less disparity in lower body strength.

Sedentary males and females will have lower STR, I give them typically around STR 8 (male) and 6 (female).

Labourers such as miners will have higher STR, STR 12 for the typical human male miner; in most societies few females engage in hard labour; women who voluntarily do so are likely to be exceptional. Eg if I stat a human female blacksmith she's probably an 'heroic', PC-type character, she likely became a blacksmith because of her near-superhuman STR. I'd likely give her STR 16. In a society where for some reason average women routinely engaged in hard labour (but were not malnourished, as in a gulag) then STR 8 would be reasonable.

 

[S'mon]

And, if you are giving typical pseudo-medieval women a strength of 6 or 7, I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of physical exertion in the lives of such people. You might have an argument that modern couch-potato and office-worker women might have that low a strength, but not in a world without machinery to pump your water and haul things around for you.

IRL women have superior carrying capacity relative to strength than men do. This is mostly due to physical build - eg women have wider hips. Wider hips also mean women run slower, relative to other factors like leg length, though.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

As for cross-gender play, I don't like being told I can't play a female Paladin just because somebody noticed I'm a male.* I see it as no different than playing another species. Human men & women have more in common than humans and Fey. Or sentient stones.

I dunno, I think I'd be able to play a sentient rock better than a Human female.

I've been in campaigns where various stat, and other, gender differences were used and they just seemed unneccessary. But then, one of the rallying cries for most of the game groups I've been privleged to be a part of has always been: "Get on with it!"

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's fine to play around with gender roles and the like in the setting and story material, and that can have some ramifications on rules bits. Drow females get +Wis, Drow males get +Dex, or whatever.

I would personally feel uncomfortable if any game felt the need to codify in the rules the subtle physical differences between the actual human genders, though. There are physical differences. They are of such fine detail, compared to the difference between, say, an elf and a human, let alone a dragon and a human, or a terrasque and a human, that they are not generally worth making mechanically distinct. The rules are not meant to model reality, so using them to enforce a "realistic" gender model (subject to the DM's interpretation of "realistic") seems remarkably small-minded, and would make me question where the DM's priorities in this game lie. There are MUCH bigger things to worry about, and unless gender roles are going to feature prominently in the coming campaign, it'd be pointless. And if gender roles ARE going to feature prominently in the coming campaign, I'd be worried, since the potential for awkward gaming suddenly skyrocketed -- there's not many people I'd trust with those issues in simple casual conversation, let alone in the medium of a game of D&D.

For fantasy races and imaginary societies, though you basically get a pass from me, as long as you don't expect to pigeonhole my own character based on gender. If I want to play a badass female halfling fighter with a gnarly scar on her face and a tendency to sit with her legs open, I'd generally expect the DM to roll with it, even if she gets weird looks and sexist comments on occasion (which she then fixes by kicking ass). In D&D, she's still a heroic heroine, and she still saves the town from dragons, and maybe she earns respect, admiration, and sweet, sweet gold from even the turnip farmers who expect their wives to be barefoot and preggers in the kitchen, and maybe she helps them to question that (or fails to, and creates a lot of widows...awkward...).

I don't think you need to go overboard and be hyper-PC about it, especially if the folks you personally game with are on board (y'know, if the people you game with are on board for FATAL, that's great, even if it's not my noise), and I think there needs to be room for exploring gender dynamics in a fantasy role, since they're tied up so tightly in myth and legend in general anyway. But I do think you need to be careful not to weird out your players, and you do need to make sure the game is fun for all different types of characters. Do that and you're solid. The former you're the best judge of (and you could probably get away with things that an RPG company never could), the latter you just need to be aware of enough to avoid it.