Genders - What's the difference?

[Celebrim]

Do you assign a -2 penalty to Jump checks for white PC's?

If not, why?

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo56swo_FFc"]World Record High Jump[/ame]

Because there isn't a lot of evidence for Europeans not being able to jump. For most of history, they dominated high jumping events.

There is much better evidence for 'white people' not being as fast over sprint distances than people of African descent, but even then its an open question of whether that is due to inclination rather than nature (there is pretty good evidence that atheletics are more attractive as a career to people who have some reason to be or feel desparate). Further complicating the problem is that it isn't pure Africans that dominate the sprint distances, but a narrow slice of slave descended/Anglo descended sprinters with about 10-30% European genes that extends over a geographic area from Jamaica across the Caribean to the Mississippi river valley (and the descendents of those people who've immigrated to other regions).

Further complicating the problem is that even if the difference is measurable, in the case of both jump and run speed, the difference is so small (3 centimeters or less probably related to sprint speed, a few hundredths of seconds over 100 meters) that it wouldn't even equate to a -1 penalty in game terms. In the case of doing fine scale modifiers like that to races/genders/born under astrological sign, I've done things like 25% chance of a -1 penalty to jump.

If the relationship between mass and strength are important, do ogres (and any large animal or monster) bat PC's around like rag dolls in a fight?

If not, why?

The relationship between mass and strength isn't linear with mass, but with cross sectional area, and can be effected in the real world by all sorts of factors like proportional bone mass (see chimpanzee, for example).

That said, the grapple bonuses of large animals are such that its very difficult for an average human to avoid being locked down by any sort of grapple attack, and if you implement throwing as a combat manuever (as I have) or even if you just apply size modifiers to overrun and bullrush, then yeah, a big creature can really toss around a small one.

Do PC's falling do HP damage, or does it break their bones?

If not, why?

Potentially, yes, in my game it does. All falls are treated as critical hits for the purposes of generating massive trauma saves, and so in some cases falling will break bones and do other traumatic injuries and not 'just' hit point damage.

See where I'm going with this? Why specifically apply 'realism' to gender, in a game where it's applied precious few other places?

No, I don't see where you are going with this. All games must pick and choose which realities that they want to track and to what degree that they want to track them. One particular difference between most of your examples and the case of tracking gender differences is that gender differences usually work themselves out as a character creation complexity issue rather than a game resolution complexity issue. Character creation complexities are usually a 'one time cost' and so tracking them in great complexity can be a valid decision for a designer that wants to meet certain genera conventions well. In the case of your genera convention being 'reality', that might include tracking gender.

Or it might not, depending on what you want to capture.

The even bigger problem with your post is that what is realistic (and therefore what is selectively realistic) is a matter of opinion, as your racial (racist) sterotyping indicates. The more usual problem is that we can't agree over what realism is, not over whether we are being selective about it.

In full disclosure, my game doesn't automatically track gender because in fantasy conventions there is usually no physical difference between women and men (even though this is admittedly pure fantasy). However, there is an option to take traits 'Fairer Sex' which radically alters your races standard attribute modifiers, or 'Second Class Citizen' which gives you social penalties reflective of the broader mysogyny that is often present in ancient inspired cultures. (I suppose you could jokingly argue that the 'Meathead' trait is the male equivalent of these.)

Thus, if the player wants to have a character whose gender is strongly reflected on his or character sheet, he or she may have it, but the game system doesn't forcibly impose that on you. I should note however that I very frequently impose those traits on my NPC's.

 

[Celebrim]

There is much better evidence for 'white people' not being as fast over sprint distances than people of African descent, but even then its an open question of whether that is due to inclination rather than nature (there is pretty good evidence that atheletics are more attractive as a career to people who have some reason to be or feel desparate). Further complicating the problem is that it isn't pure Africans that dominate the sprint distances, but a narrow slice of slave descended/Anglo descended sprinters with about 10-30% European genes that extends over a geographic area from Jamaica across the Caribean to the Mississippi river valley (and the descendents of those people who've immigrated to other regions).

Let me expound on this further, because I want it to be absolutely clear what I'm saying here.

The people of Jamaica dominate international sprinting events in a way that is far out sized with their population.

I happened to grow up in Jamaica. So I know what I speak of here, and the people of Jamaica value running far more than Americans do. So, it is a very open question as to whether the 1% or 3% edge that they have over some other racial/cultural group is the result of the fact that they have a better set of genes for sprinting than some other group, or the fact that they continually make and encourage their youths to sprint and run from a very young age and bestow such social respect on those that are fast.

What's realistic here? Nature or nurture or some combination of the two? And is the edge here something that easily translates to your system? Unlike my system, in your system speed probably isn't a skill so you probably have even less tools for addressing racial/cultural diversity in speed than I do. What a system implements as realistic is often as much a matter of the limitations of the system as it is any concerns about what might be realistic. It might be realistic, but if the modifiers are tiny compared to the complexity that they create, why bother?

However, physical differences and even mental differences between the sexes are well established as being strongly rooted in genes rather than cultural environment and are far larger and more easily measured than the sort of differences behind even false sterotypes like "White men can't jump." or others of the sort I won't repeat here simply because I don't want to promote additional offensive statements. Those statements are offensive because they are false/unreflective, and not because its offensive to comtemplate that human genetic diversity might have some impact on relative ability.

 

[Umbran]

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?

Well, that depends on what you call realism. It isn't realistic to have separate modifiers for humans, because human sexual dimorphism isn't particularly drastic - human women and men are, overall, pretty darned similar, and their overall ranges of qualities overlap to a great degree.

This is not true for all species on Earth, however. So it isn't unrealistic to have a race that has stronger dimorphism to have racial modifiers, or even different racial abilities depending on gender.

Nor is it all that unrealistic to have multiple genders - some forms of single-celled animals on Earth have on the order of a hundred genders*.



*Yes, I know you were taught they reproduced asexually in school. Humans don't separate the steps of exchanging genetic information and producing new individuals. Ciliates do separate those steps.

 

[Crothian]

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.

Is all about being unfairly penalized? What if the gender you wanted to play got bonuses but no real penalties then? Or it was well balanced and the penalties were done fairly?

 

[JustKim]

Is all about being unfairly penalized? What if the gender you wanted to play got bonuses but no real penalties then? Or it was well balanced and the penalties were done fairly?

I don't understand how you can ask me how I would feel about well balanced game mechanics attached to gender. It doesn't matter how balanced they are, they shouldn't exist. If they exist, they marginalize some choices and promote others. I want the full range of choices when I play a female character, no more and no less.

 

[Umbran]

I don't understand how you can ask me how I would feel about well balanced game mechanics attached to gender. It doesn't matter how balanced they are, they shouldn't exist. If they exist, they marginalize some choices and promote others. I want the full range of choices when I play a female character, no more and no less.

Well, we have game mechanics for species (elf, dwarf, human, and so on) - that does more marginalizing of some choices and not others, right? Do you object to them? How are gender mechanics different than race mechanics?

Note, I'm not a fan of gender-based mechanics for humans or near-humans (like dwarves and elves and orcs, and so on), but I think the answer to the above questions are important to the discussion.

 

[Crothian]

I don't understand how you can ask me how I would feel about well balanced game mechanics attached to gender. It doesn't matter how balanced they are, they shouldn't exist. If they exist, they marginalize some choices and promote others. I want the full range of choices when I play a female character, no more and no less.

I'm not talking about gender based level limits or class restrictions like in 1e. You would still have the full options of choices like everyone in the game has. Lots of races have bonuses and penalties and that does not prevent them from being whatever they want.

Also, what if the gender based modifiers were only positive (no negatives at all)? Does that make a difference?

 

[GSHamster]

D&D should not only reflect "realism", it also should reflect fantasy stories and literature.

And one real change since the days of 1st Ed is the increasing prevalence of female heroines.[1] Especially in YA and urban fantasy. The kickass female warrior is a genuine archetype at this point.

I think that gender stat differences no longer represent how modern fantasy literature views women. And that's an additional reason to not bother with them.

[1] Though, to be fair, even Tolkien had Eowyn.

 

[Janx]

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.

Sure, on average, men are stronger. But a D&D hero isn't constrained by the limitations of the mundane individual.

(Or, at least, doesn't have to be constrained, no offense to simulationists/fiction-firsters/whatever all y'all call yourself these days.)

Also consider that the average NPCs may follow this logic. average men are stronger, and average women are weaker.

But PCs are heroes. They naturally are better than average, and as a result, their stats are subject to any "sexist" skew.

Furthermore, consider that overall, male gamers outnumber female gamers. Assuming each gamer plays their gender, then the % of female PCs will be small, much like the "strong women are rare" logic that a GM seeking rules like this would have been going for.

Basically, by doing nothing, the statistical spread is close enough to reality.

By making rules that make female PCs weaker, you are basically biasing the game against female PCs. In today's world, that smells like sexism, and isn't worth the political hassle, let alone any actual benefit to the game.

its kind of like "what was Gary thinking when he wrote those rules?" Were female PCs such a problem that he had to put a cap on that to block all the gaming abuse? Was he sick and tired of every gamer (who at the time, was probably a male), playing a slutty PMS-ticating stereotype that if he had to roleplay one more seduction encounter he'd shoot himself? bad enough he had to roleplay bar maids getting hit on, now he's got to deal with male player's warped view of what it is to be a woman in Greyhawk.

 

[Crothian]

D&D has very little in common with today's Urban Fantasy except for many of them have characters that play D&D or reference it in some way.