If there's one game where stat differences are justified, what game would that be?

Bad idea overall I wouldn't enforce the gender rules for 1E.

It might make sense in some ultra gritty and realistic rpg but I probably wouldn't want to play such a system.

Sacrosanct said:

That's kinda the point. D&D is fantasy. So who cares if human women can have the same strength as human men.

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That's kinda the point. D&D is fantasy. So who cares if human women DOESN'T have the same strength as human men.

It seems that it's really important to make them equal and if you are not doing that, it's somehow incorrect.

So who cares if human women DOESN'T have the same strength as human men.

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I can think of some female gamers* who care.







* real-world ones

[No message]

Just because there are great things in the world worth caring about does not mean we cannot or should not fervently care about frivolities as well.

I mean, if you truly feel that way, perhaps you should stop posting on a board about RPGs and join the Peace Corp, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, the ACLU, The Innocence Project or some other organization you believe is genuinely attempting to better the world.

(FWIW, Glamour stripped Caitlin Jenner of their WotY award.)

Dannyalcatraz said:

I can think of some female gamers* who care.







* real-world ones

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This my wife doesn't want to play 1E RAW because of the gender limitations in it. She doesn't mind 2E or clones. I do not regard it as integral to 1E either.

Even in 1E 18/00 is doable for very strong women IRL so it fails the realism test as well.

I have never seen anyone legitimately roll 18/00 anyway.

MGibster said:

Very often people have used realism as a defense for restricting the types of people who can be represented in games which understandably raises some hackles. Given that we're talking about realism within the context of a fantasy setting doesn't it seem odd that we draw the line in the sand when it comes to stat differences between men and women? "Oh, no. I can certainly accept an army of skeleton warriors that sprang up from those dragon teeth I sowed but a female character with the same strength as my male character? Humbug! There's fantasy and then there's fantasy, folks!"

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No this is shifting the goal posts. Nobody has said it's wrong to have games where gender has no impact.

This discussion is about whether it's wrong to have *any* games with a gender impact, even though real life is one of the "games" where gender has the biggest impact (when it comes to bending bars, lifting portcullis and wielding huge greatswords).

CapnZapp said:

No this is shifting the goal posts. Nobody has said it's wrong to have games where gender has no impact.

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The conversation has drifted a bit since your opening post and I'm addressing issues of "realism" that others have brought up to justify a stat penalty for women characters. I haven't shifted the goal posts at all.

This discussion is about whether it's wrong to have *any* games with a gender impact, even though real life is one of the "games" where gender has the biggest impact (when it comes to bending bars, lifting portcullis and wielding huge greatswords).

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In your opening post you posit a setting where hulking brutes are, by definition, male, and in D&D terms such a setting would penalize women characters with a -4 Strength with a minimum of 8. From the very beginning you made stat penalties a part of the discussion and I think my observation is valid. Many people have used "realism" to justify the exclusion of women as equal characters in their fantasy games.

I don't know if anyone has posted that it's wrong to have any games where gender has an impact. But some people have concerns about settings where "realism" penalizes women characters. If you didn't want this to be part of the discussion you probably shouldn't have brought up stat penalties in the first place.

Thought: Why use penalties?

Why not use bonuses?

If your system says the difference between men and women is a 4 Strength, why not give men +4 strength? Define things by what they are instead of what they're not.

Also: I could see this working in a very cheeseball sci-fi setting where we've destroyed the earth and men are literally from Mars and women are from Venus. Ya know "Plan 9 from Outer Space" kind of stuff.

MGibster said:

I don't know if anyone has posted that it's wrong to have any games where gender has an impact. But some people have concerns about settings where "realism" penalizes women characters. If you didn't want this to be part of the discussion you probably shouldn't have brought up stat penalties in the first place.

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I don't think the question of stat penalties is particularly interesting. It's a D&D centric approach to mechanics, and one of several systems you could use. I don't really care about the mechanical details, since I think that would end up creating a proxy argument where we acted like we cared a great deal about the mechanical details and spent a lot of time arguing about them, but really we cared or didn't care about something more fundamental. So let's ignore the exact mechanical process, and just assume that there exists some game where sex is an early choice in the chargen process and it ultimately impacts in some fashion the character so that you get different results on average or in the extremes depending on which biological sex you took.

Lets also leave out the question of 'equality'. While that's an interesting question, feminism has never been based on the idea that men and women are equal in capability much less in all capabilities, but rather that they are equally valuable as men and equally deserving of protection by the law and of all rights to pursue their own happiness. As Thaddeus Stevens put it regarding a different question of equality, "How can I hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands, stinking, the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio, proof that some men are inferior, endowed by their Maker with dim wits, impermeable to reason, with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot, red blood! You are more reptile than man, George! So low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you...Yet even you, Pendleton, who should have been gibbeted for treason long before today. Even worthless, unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law! And so again, sir, again and again and again I say, I do not hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law." So let's dispense with concerns about whether the characters made according to those choices are equal, since how could we possibly measure that anyway. All we really know about the characters is that they are different in some fashion. Perhaps only women characters can be novelists and only male characters can be master swordsmen. If we are playing D&D, this might not be that interesting - because D&D tends to be about killing things and taking their stuff and I've yet to see a player conceive that they want to play a novelist. But in some other game, maybe this is interesting, even if and maybe because it isn't equal.

I don't know if anyone has posted that it's wrong to have any games where gender has an impact. But some people have concerns about settings where "realism" penalizes women characters.

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These two statements seem to me to be in contradiction. As far as I'm concerned, if there is ever a time where gender has an impact, it better darn well be because of realism. If it's not because of realism, then I would consider it sexism. But on the other hand, there seems to be people on the board that go beyond saying, "It's a fantasy. It doesn't need to be realistic." And they also seem to go beyond say, "It's Conan. That portrayal was not strictly inspired by realism, and on the contrary depicts women in a fantasy manner that is often though perhaps not always demeaning and degrading to many if not all women." If that was all that was being said, I'd be in full agreement.

But now I do ask, are there some here saying it is wrong to have a game where the choice of sex matters? Are there some here who are saying realism requires the choice of sex to not matter? If there are, I don't intend to argue that topic. I just want to understand whether that is really what is going on.