D&D 5E Should the next edition of D&D promote more equality?

[haakon1]

So I just don't understand the logic here. Is Briene (from Game of Thrones) a completely unrealistic character?

Since you quoted me, I assume you are asking me. I can't explain "anti-Briene" logic, because I'm not anti-Briene.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Let's step it up a notch. What would it tell you if someone asked "What sort of Intelligence penalty rule should I implement for dark-skinned humans?" Would such a rule make the game more realistic? Certainly there are folks who feel it would, and there is even some "scientific" work that supports it. Would you applaud a game utilizing such a rule for its simulationism or verisimilitude? Could the author of such a game come here and say he wrote that for the sake of "realism"?

For me, I think it would tell me more about the author than the world.

If you want to see what that looks like, look up RaHoWa RPG.

If you don't want to have to wipe your hard drive out of disgust, don't look up RaHoWa RPG.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Let's step it up a notch. What would it tell you if someone asked "What sort of Intelligence penalty rule should I implement for dark-skinned humans?" Would such a rule make the game more realistic? Certainly there are folks who feel it would, and there is even some "scientific" work that supports it. Would you applaud a game utilizing such a rule for its simulationism or verisimilitude? Could the author of such a game come here and say he wrote that for the sake of "realism"?

For me, I think it would tell me more about the author than the world.

Apples and oranges. There's all kinds of evidence for gender differences in strength and none as far as I know for racial differences in intelligence.

 

[Hussar]

Apples and oranges. There's all kinds of evidence for gender differences in strength and none as far as I know for racial differences in intelligence.

Actually, that's not true. There is most certainly research for racial differences in intelligence. Some years ago a professor at University of Western Ontario made big ripples publishing just such a paper.

But, again, let's run with things. What modifier are we talking about here that preserves your sense of realism for men being stronger than women, but, allows for 2 foot tall, 30 pound halflings to be only 2 points weaker than a human.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And, for that matter, much larger creatures that are only 2 points stronger. 4Ed was particularly bad at this- look at Dragonborn, Minotaurs, etc.- massively muscular races, averaging over 7' in height and 400lbs or more in weight.

IOW, nearly twice as massive as average humans, +2 STR. Same as Orcs.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Ok, let's run with this.

What modifier should women have? How do you express this in a game, so that it is as realistic as possible?

That's a fair enough question; let's see what I can come up with...

I'll use 2E as it's the system I'm most familiar with. Based on my 2E Players Handbook, which lists deadlift capability by strength score, and cursory research of male and female deadlift capability from this site: http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards.html it looks like the difference ought to be about 3 points. I'd probably express this as a +3 bonus for men to a strength roll.

There's also evidence that women do better than men in certain areas of fine motor skills, social interaction, endurance, and pain control. These are very difficult to quantify in game terms, as the relevant stats of dexterity, charisma, and constitution are each conglomerates of a bunch of different traits and unlike strength, the book offers no hard standard for what particular scores mean. For simplicity and fairness I'd say female humans get 3 bonus points to allocate as their player pleases among dex, cha, and con.

The strength cap of 25 I'd leave the same for both men and women, as no human reaches this without serious magical augmentation.

The one serious problem I see with this system is that the of presence strength percentile scores would greatly increase the difference. I don't think this will be the case with 5E.

And as I said previously, I'd state right in the core that a player can use the male mods if what he wants is a strong female PC.

That's off the top of my head, so feel free to huck rocks at it, but in very approximate terms that's about what I would like to see.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Actually, that's not true. There is most certainly research for racial differences in intelligence. Some years ago a professor at University of Western Ontario made big ripples publishing just such a paper.

But, again, let's run with things. What modifier are we talking about here that preserves your sense of realism for men being stronger than women, but, allows for 2 foot tall, 30 pound halflings to be only 2 points weaker than a human.

Maybe I should have specified "credible" or "widely accepted" research. You can find "research" supporting just about any oddball claim you care to look for on the internet.

And I totally agree on halflings. They should have a much lower strength score than the average human. I'd change that too.

 

[mythago]

I'll use 2E as it's the system I'm most familiar with. Based on my 2E Players Handbook, which lists deadlift capability by strength score, and cursory research of male and female deadlift capability from this site: http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards.html it looks like the difference ought to be about 3 points. I'd probably express this as a +3 bonus for men to a strength roll.

According to the site you linked to: "Keep in mind, the standards shown in the tables do not represent the highest level of strength performance possible." They are, as far as I can tell, standards of what deadlifters should be able to accomplish based on past results from a single weightlifting category (deadlift) from 1950 to the present....with no clear statement of where the data came from and whether they are representative. I find it a bit difficult to believe that, especially given cultural attitudes about female strength and weightlifting, that these are an accurate representations of potential STR scores in real-life humans that can be seamlessly ported to D&D.

But that aside, the issue is that we have a system that is unrealistic about human ability from the get-go, and so worrying that it accurately reflects maximum human STR potential by gender is....well, misplaced. We know why Dragonborn and gnomes only vary slightly from the human norms, despite that variance being wholly unrealistic: game balance. Given that, I find it very strange to bring a wargamer-like focus on realism between human males and females.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

According to the site you linked to: "Keep in mind, the standards shown in the tables do not represent the highest level of strength performance possible." They are, as far as I can tell, standards of what deadlifters should be able to accomplish based on past results from a single weightlifting category (deadlift) from 1950 to the present....with no clear statement of where the data came from and whether they are representative. I find it a bit difficult to believe that, especially given cultural attitudes about female strength and weightlifting, that these are an accurate representations of potential STR scores in real-life humans that can be seamlessly ported to D&D.

But that aside, the issue is that we have a system that is unrealistic about human ability from the get-go, and so worrying that it accurately reflects maximum human STR potential by gender is....well, misplaced. We know why Dragonborn and gnomes only vary slightly from the human norms, despite that variance being wholly unrealistic: game balance. Given that, I find it very strange to bring a wargamer-like focus on realism between human males and females.

Well, that site was the best I found in 10 minutes of search. If I was actually doing rules for release, I'd consult an actual expert. And the 3 pt gap was pretty consistent across degrees of experience. And as I said above, If I was writing the rules I'd definitely increase the differences between races too.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION], sorry I can't XP post 404 upthread.

illustrations virtually never have any sort of unambiguous context to the scenes they depict (short us being told, or otherwise having it clearly indicated, that they're meant to represent a specific scene from a specific narrative). Given that, why not presume that, if the characters depicted are part of a larger world, how they're equipped is sufficient for a scenario that they're either heading for or returning from.

Look at the cover of the 4e DMG2. There are two people who dominate that scene - a man and a woman. They are descending a steep stone stairway cut into the side of a cliff; across the valley from them is a sinister-looking fortress of some kind. The woman is wearing a midriff top with a lot of cleavage displayed, and the artist has her posed with her back arched, so that her breasts project forward, further amplifying her cleavage.

Some of my thoughts on this illustration. First, it seems to me that there is no dispute that this woman is drawn in a sexualised way, in the sense that she is deliberately presented as a sexually attractive figure. Second, the artist has made some degree of effort to achieve this result - the woman's arched-backed pose is not the most natural way to depict a person descending a cliff-side stairway. Third, this sexualisation appears to have little to do with the context. For instance, there is no indication that the woman is flirting with anyone else either in the scene or off-canvass. I guess it's possible that the two people are not actually adventurers about to assault or infiltrate a ruined fortress (in the typical mode of D&D adventurers) but are in fact on their way to a party in the fort where her mode of dress would fit right in, but even if that were so it still doesn't explain why she is stopping for a sexy stretch half-way down the cliff.
[MENTION=3019]mythago[/MENTION] has made the broader points I would have made about censorship, so I'll focus my response to this pictrure more narrowly. The cover of DMG2 is an illustration on the cover of a commercial product. It therefore serves a range of communicative functions: the main one is conveying, in somewhat general, abstract and allusive terms, the subject matter of the contents; a related one is marketing the work, that is, making it an attractive object of consumption for likely consumers; a somewhat secondary function is conveying, in some fashion, the artist's ideas about fantasy adventuer, the human form, etc.

If, from the publisher's point of view, the cover fails in the first or second of these functions that is, in itself, a good reason to get rid of it and try again. If, from the purcahser and user's point of view, the cover gives a misleading impression of the contents of the book, that is also a reason to get rid of it, I think. And for me, as a purchaser and user of that book, I think it does give a misleading impression. It implies that the book has sexual themes or content or concerns that in fact it doesn't. It is a misleading cover. That in itself is a reason to revise it.

There is also the broader question of whether illustrations that sexualise women is therefore sexist. As a general proposition, I don't know that is true. But I think there is something sexist, and potentially demeaning, in the more narrow idea conveyed by the cover of the DMG 2 - namely that, even in fantasy adventuring contexts, it is women's sexuality and sexiness that is their most salient characteristic. Two people might have different views about the morals and politics of lingerie catalogues, or of pornography, yet still agree that there is something weird about so much D&D art being so obviously obsessed by women's sexuality, when that sexuality plays so little role in the game as presented in the rulebooks and most adventures. However uncertain we may be about detailed contexts, we know enough about the overall context of D&D as a mainstream fantasy adventure RPG to know that sexuality is not the main thing addressed by the books.

TL;DR: D&D pictures are full of (faux-)mediaeval weapons; and armour; and castles; and orcs; and dragons; and dramatic displays of magic; and prominently displayed cleavage, breasts, thighs and belly-buttons. What does that last set of things have to do with the fiction that the game rules and texts are actually concerned with?

deontological ethics hold that the morality of an action is determined by the action itself, and in no way by the results of that action

That is not really true. First, deontological morality categorises classes of action by their (typical) effects - for instance, killings are wrong because they (typically) resut in the radical undermining of some particular individual's interest in living his/her life. Kant explains the wrongness of lying by considering the consequences of a universalisation of acting on the principle that lying is permissible (namely, all rational communication would become impossible).

Second, deontological morality categorises individual actions by reference to their effects, too - I don't think anyone would categorise attempted murder as being as serious as murder, for instance.

It's certainly true that deontologists are not going to measure "results" or "consequences" simply by reference to aggregate measures of welfare or utility. But I don't see much of that sort of analysis in this thread. The dominant line of reasoning that I'm seeing is that gratuitously sexualised art wrongs or demeans women because of the conception of women that it commuinicates. That is a perfectly tenable form of deontological argument.