Genders - What's the difference?

[thastygliax]

It's pretty easy to accept "no difference between genders" if you also accept that character creation rules don't have to be world modeling rules.

Well said! Differences between the genders shouldn't be imposed by the rules, but by the setting--and those will almost always be social differences, not physical ones.

 

[Oryan77]

What if I played a half-Elf/half-Dwarf? Do I get the best of both worlds, or the worst?

Vitally important questions, both!

My gosh, could this be a case for... house rules?! Oh my.

I'd say that you get half of what the elf gets and half of what the dwarf gets. But still, do you get the good halves or the bad halves? Good question. And what if your half dwarf/elf was a hermaphrodite? Then what do you get?

 

[olshanski]

I may have missed a post earlier, but you really need to be precise about your language here.

Gender is a social construct... In modern USA, feminine being the gender that takes care of children, expresses feelings, does housework, watches chick-flicks. The masculine gender watches sports, fixes machines, does yardwork, acts tough.

Sex is biological. Male sex has a penis and y chromosome. Female has a vagina and 2 x chromosomes. This is not a social construct.

You are probably asking whether sex differences (biological) should be reflected in stats, and I'd say "no".
I've never actually heard of a game that incorporates differences based on gender, and that would be interesting and I probably wouldn't object to it if it were handled well.

{EDIT: Never mind, I see my use of language is stuck in the 70s and 80s. This distinction between sex/gender that I described above started in the 50s-70s... before the 50s, gender was only used for grammer. Nowadays it is apparently OK for "Gender" and "sex" to be used interchangably--unless you are looking at literature specifically for feminists or sociologists or psycologists. My apologies.
I still stand by my statement that there should be no differences between sexes, but if you wanted to add a difference based on gender, it could be interesting. Butch women and manly men would get a bonus to some stats and a penalty to others, while girly women and effeminate men would get a bonus and penalty to different stats.}

 

[ExploderWizard]

And what if your half dwarf/elf was a hermaphrodite? Then what do you get?

Either twice as many or no offers for a date on a Saturday night?

 

[Dracorat]

While I think that in many cases, there are real-world differences in gender, a system should not enforce difference.

If a player chooses a gender as a matter of stat and plays the character as a manifestation of dice rolls and ability uses, the gender doesn't matter anyway; it's a tertiary stat primarily used when for some reason a magic effect might have to act upon a gender or something similar; situations which rarely occur.

If a player chooses a gender and then attempts to play the character as a flesh-and-blood character, they will naturally have a mental image of what the character can and cannot do and will attempt to mold the character in that image. In this case, the difference between the genders will happen automatically and transparently.

In either case, if the system introduces differences for different genders, it is introducing only the potential for disappointment as a player chooses one but loathes not being able to have the "benefits" of the other. Unnecessary; for the reasons just described.

 

[Kaodi]

If nothing else, it should be problematic to assume that the differences between the sexes are going to be same for every race. I mean, you can choose for the differences in different races to be the same, but there is no inherent reason why they must be the same.

As for gender as a social construction... I think it is perhaps slightly mistaken to assume that gender differences cannot produce sex differences, though the degree is likely negligible in the short term; adherence to gender norms could theoretically exert a selection pressure in favour of the "socially constructed" qualities...

 

[billd91]

It depends. For most games rules and character types/races, my answer is a most emphatic NO.

But I do like to have the option in the game for certain roles or races to have gender-based differences. The Aslan in Traveller would be half as interesting if they didn't have such stark gender differences between males and females. It would be up to the player to choose to live with the gender role differences or pick a different sort of character.

While some wag might say that in any game a player could choose to play a male or female, forcing a female player to play a male character to avoid penalties isn't going to cut it in an RPG looking for a broader audience.

 

[Crothian]

It seems many people don't like it for realism reasons. What if we toss out the realism. I create a race that has three different genders and each gender has its own racial modifiers; what do people think about it then?

 

[The Human Target]

Thats a level of minutiae I'm uninterested in bothering with in my games.

 

[JustKim]

It seems many people don't like it for realism reasons. What if we toss out the realism. I create a race that has three different genders and each gender has its own racial modifiers; what do people think about it then?

I don't think I would care, unless one of the genders is clearly analogous to women. Playing a female character is a point of reference for me, and if there's no point of reference to be found then I'm not inclined to automatically choose one gender, and I don't feel unfairly penalized for playing what comes naturally.