Women and Children first?

[Snapdragyn]

It occurs to me that the other thing being neglected by those suggesting females of other D&D species as noncoms due to physical differences (in addition to the obvious generalization that because such differences exist in humans they must exist in other sapient species) is the presence of magic. If females of a species are more likely to display magical talent - either through greater likelihood of inheriting the ability (sorcerers), through greater aptitude with magical studies (wizards), or through preference of the divine (clerics & druids) - then the relative power of each gender within the society would not be so disparate. In a short-lived gameworld homebrew, I had a city where women ruled for exactly this reason; they held all knowledge of magical power & men were strictly forbidden to learn magic. Strength in battle is more than strength at arms.

As mentioned earlier, females are vital for breeding and it would be natural behavior to keep the women away from the front lines if at all possible.

This is a generalization based on human experience. For polyandrous species, keeping men away from the front lines would be 'natural', since one woman could mate with many men. Try telling a phalarope or buttonquail that males aren't important for breeding - then watch all of the eggs die without a male to brood them.

Likewise, for a species with true lifetime monogamy - no 'dating around' before marriage, no divorce, no cheating - sending the 10 males from a village of 20 residents away to battle & having only 1 come back to the 10 females left behind is only going to lead to 1 breeding couple & 9 lonely spinsters. In such a society, sending 5 males & 5 females from this hypothetical village to battle would be more logical, since it would leave 5 breeding couples after the battle instead of only 1.

Human experience != all sapient species experience.

 

[Wisdom Penalty]

Virtually all of my humanoid species are dominantly male as far as combat goes. As mentioned earlier, females are vital for breeding and it would be natural behavior to keep the women away from the front lines if at all possible.

Same here.

But our games tend to be more "realistic" and less "fantastical" and so this kind of thing helps with the whole suspension of disbelief.

To each his own.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In most of my races, I go with 3e's egalitarian gender baseline, because it's more fun and allows more options. But depending on how much I look into the culture of the various races, the specific tendencies differ.

For instance, most of my dwarf societies tend to be very patriarchal. Your father is the head of the clan, your lineage is based through your father, etc. The females become important in a defensive role (all dwarves are still warriors!), the males become important in an offensive role (expanding dwarven territory), and most are very happy with the arrangement because it divides the labor up nice and neatly and dwarves don't take to changes in tradition very easily, so the idea of a "women's lib" movement for dwarves would be met with horror and suspicion from almost all dwarves.

Of course, this allows the great "expelled from my village" backstory for the female dwarven warrior in the game!

My elves are very communal. They don't mate for life, or for more than an evening, taking delight in a variety and variance of many partners of many different species and races, delighting in the romance of the moment. Pregnancy rarely occurs in females (it is tied to the cycles of the moon -- they're only fertile when the moon is new), and when it does, the children are not raised by a family, but by the entire community (mostly, that is, the elders).

My orcs tend to be matriarchal. The males are expendible troops, the females are the true constant authority, and orc tribes are based on a mother's daughters, not on a father's sons. The females tend to be larger and more obese, living the 'high life' off of the tribute the males bring. The males are more ostentatious, displaying wealth and power for the delight of the ladies, who adore such things. Thus every orc-king is actually just trying to impress the fattest woman of the tribe with how brutal and bloody he is. The women in the tribe have their wealth measured largely by fecundity, and so a barren orc woman is very shameful, but they also don't fight much, being largely in a position of breeding as much as possible. This is why most half-orcs come from orc women and human men -- sometimes the captives will be used as baby-makers, in the hopes that their bastard-spawn will still be presentable as children. Orc men largely find human women to be distastefully thin and sickly.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

This is a generalization based on human experience. For polyandrous species, keeping men away from the front lines would be 'natural', since one woman could mate with many men. Try telling a phalarope or buttonquail that males aren't important for breeding - then watch all of the eggs die without a male to brood them.

Both sexes are important. The difference is when the offspring gestate within the mother. In these cases the offspring are vulnerable to the death of the mother prior to their birth. Dad can do his fertilization and then get popped by a predator and it will have a lot less impact on the offspring. The time I had a species where the females dominated and were fiercer warriors, they also laid eggs, which the males cared for.

Likewise, for a species with true lifetime monogamy - no 'dating around' before marriage, no divorce, no cheating - sending the 10 males from a village of 20 residents away to battle & having only 1 come back to the 10 females left behind is only going to lead to 1 breeding couple & 9 lonely spinsters. In such a society, sending 5 males & 5 females from this hypothetical village to battle would be more logical, since it would leave 5 breeding couples after the battle instead of only 1.

Oh, let's be real here, you would have one breeding couple and nine lonley spinsters who each become pregnant, coincidentally shortly after the one remaning male drops by to help them fix something in their home...

 

[Gez]

Human experience != all sapient species experience.

Maybe, but all fiction is about the human experience.

 

[Tonguez]

I don't think I would ever create a hermaphroditic race unless they still required two sides to mate. No asexual budding in my books! Call me a romantic.

IMC
Gnome culture is inspired by equal parts Smurfs, Pratchett and Naked Mole Rats. This means that Gnomes are born hermaphrodites with only a vistigial genital 'bump'. Gnomes can remain in this state for their entire lifetime. However occasionally environmnetal factors will cause a mature gnome to develop gender traits. 1 in 100 will develop female gender traits (genitals and mammaries) and perhaps 5 in 100 will develop male traits (beard and male genitals).

Females will go on to become a Clan Mother giving birth to a litter of approximately 100 gnomelings over her lifetime. The Clan mother rules her bothers and the non gendered gnomes (who are all combatants) and she will direct her male brothers to be married to one or more other 'Clan Mothers' and thus formalize peace between the 'sister clans' (ie a Clan Mother will have approx 5 mates drawn from other clans) these clans together form a tribe). Clans within a tribe do not war against each other but may fight other clans.
A female gnome adventurer is a true anomaly other gnomes will think either that her clan is dead and she has gone mad because of it or will be horrofied in her having turned her back on her duties to her clan

Orc Culture is marked by Gender dimorphism (the females are larger but less bestial)and strict gender seperation. Orcs are semi-nomadic clan based culture with clans made up of a a dominant female, her daughters and their whelps. At age 9 male whelps are violently expelled out of the clans and form 'mobs' (usually being absorbed into an existing mobs). The clans do not allow the mobs to settle or claim territory and instead the mobs survive by raiding. The mobs will also shadow behind one or more clans and on occasion will stage a Confrontation. This is the Orc mating ritual, a form of ritualised rape, and involves the males rushing in and attempting to abduct a female (whilst being fought off by her and her 'sisters') They must then drag her back across a safe line at which point they are permitted to 'mate with her. It is male orcs who you find out raiding human villages or hiring themselves out to BBEGSas mecenaries

Gnoll Culture is also inspired by Hyena and thus males and females have little physical difference and societies are matrilineal with a female having multiple mates. All gnolls are hunters (rather than warriors) and use the same tactics whether hunting food or enemies

Dwarf Culture is somewhat complex in its mating customs. There is very little sexual dimorphism between male and female dwarfs (both have beards and are the same size) and no gender differentiation as such. Dwarf mines are made up of various clans and a dwarf never leaves the clan into which they are born (matrilocal). However both male and female dwarfs will have multple mates from various other clans forming a vast network across the whole mine and even beyond. IE a male and female dwarf are married the female also ahs multiple other mates and the males has multiple other mates who also have other mates. These mating groups are known as 'Bond-husbands or bond-wives respectively' and the dwarf owes these bond-mates certain duties and obligations just as they do to their home clan. This is one of the many reasons why Dwarfs are so duty-bound and why leaving the mine to go adventuring is an acceptable means of 'taking a break' from ones duties

Oh, let's be real here, you would have one breeding couple and nine lonley spinsters who each become pregnant, coincidentally shortly after the one remaning male drops by to help them fix something in their home...

Getting her 'plumbing done' as it were

 

[Kahuna Burger]

The time I had a species where the females dominated and were fiercer warriors, they also laid eggs, which the males cared for.

The Kahuna Meatball recently got a book called "Mr Seahorse" which featured a great array of sea creatures in which once the eggs are laid, the male is the one who cares for them till they hatch, or minds newborns. The titular character is the most extreme - female sea horses lay their eggs into a pouch in the male's belly and he carries them until they hatch and are "born."

Folks have also mentioned the hive insect model, where the workers and warriors are female but infertile, or species where there are many females and only one breeding male in a group (like Reign of Fire, except they skipped the part where once they killed the male, the dominant female simply became male.) Given the existance of magic, it's not that hard to imagine other models which free females up from the gestation period.

Thinking of the social system, it's not impossible to consider that sending every able bodied combatant who isn't gestating or caring for an infant right then out to battle could result in more of the village as a whole surviving. And the whole magic issue skews things right around as well.

Finally, in a D&D world, survival issues are as likely to be from monsters as war, and assuming a strict gender division in that area doesn't always make as much sense. In one setting I fleshed out for a project, women tended to be rangers and formed the hunting parties, while men tended towards the barbarian and were more likely to be the raiding parties on neighboring tribes (something of a lion model). A random encounter in the area might be a bunch of testosterone pumped men on their way to count coup, or a group of atlatl bearing women, some of them with babies on their backs, who are less likely to jump you for fun but just as dangerous if they spot you first (likely) and decide you are trouble headed for their village.

My games in general assume sexual equality in the absence of a social idea I want to play with. The claim that this is automatically unrealistic feels to me like a classic case of layering magic over a world without allowing that world to be effected in any significant way, which seems just as unrealistic.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I speak in jest of course, and am not actually accusing anyone of anything (like your women big, danny?).

Only in certain dimensions, like chest, height- or perhaps the 23rd Dimension- though I've not been there, I hear the natives are friendly...

I'm not sure what their measurements would be like, though...

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

The challenge of such a philosophy is that you end up missing out on nearly every dominant human culture up to the 1970s or so in your gaming world. Romans? Spartans? Athenians? Thebans? Mongols? Habsuburgs? Franks? Vikings? Saxons? Normans? Iriquois? Aztec? Maya? You end up with a pale pastel idealized liberal 21st century version of all of them. For me, I prefer both my history and my game cultures unsanitized.

Me, if I have a roman culture, you can bet that you'll be dealing with the Pater Familias, they'll divine the future in the entrails of the sacrifices and when the oracles tell them two, they'll bury some random Gauls alive in the Forum.

Sure, in the real world. In a D&D setting, I generally tend to take the equality suggested by the gender-neutral ability score system and run with it.

Besides, plucky-female-character-making-her-way-against-the-rules-of-a-patriarchal-society stories are tired as all hell, and stories where female characters are just plain absent or relegated to hostage/prize status are too wretched to contemplate. I prefer campaigns that look sort of like the Lies of Locke Lamora setting, where gender just isn't a big deal, and both underworld thugs and captains of industry are about as likely to be female as male.

 

[Dias Ex Machina]

Only in certain dimensions, like chest, height- or perhaps the 23rd Dimension- though I've not been there, I hear the natives are friendly...

I'm not sure what their measurements would be like, though...

Since its an alternate dimension, normal rules wouldn't apply. So they would be like 33 x 15 x Ham