Sexism in Table-Top Gaming: My Thoughts On It, and What We Can Do About It

[Umbran]

I'm not sure when enw became rpgnet, but this is a reminder why I don't come here much anymore.

We used to categorically stop any such discussion as political. Then, we were made aware of how incredibly offensive it is to some women when we do that.

There are problems of sexism in our society. So, there are problems of sexism in our hobby. Refusing to talk about them says, to a large chunk of the hobby, "We don't care about your problems."

We still watch it rather carefully, and will not brook people being rude.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Any limitation imposed on female characters in the name of realism basically tells female players that their characters cannot achieve the same success as the characters of male players on the same terms... at least not without playing male characters themselves.

I'll just say this: I wouldn't have much of a problem with reality-based limits placed on female PCs if male PCs were subject to reality-based modeling that took into account areas in which femaies routinely outperform males. But those advocating for such treatment of female PCs almost never seem to want to do so.

 

[Mallus]

I'm not sure when enw became rpgnet, but this is a reminder why I don't come here much anymore.

Heh... if this were rpg.net, Celebrim would have already been permabanned. Which is kinda why I still come around here from time to time.

I may disagree with what Cel says, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it at extraordinary length!

 

[Salamandyr]

I'll just say this: I wouldn't have much of a problem with reality-based limits placed on female PCs if male PCs were subject to reality-based modeling that took into account areas in which femaies routinely outperform males. But those advocating for such treatment of female PCs almost never seem to do so.

To be fair to those advocates, they usually are willing to do so. It's just that what those areas are is often notional, and subject to argument. Back in the 80's there was a fairly popular nerd t-shirt for ladies that read "-1 Strength/+1 Charisma". Most games I saw that went hardcore for different attribute modifiers based on sex usually tried to "balance" by giving female characters bonuses to charisma, or wisdom, or magic ability, based on the idea that women were naturally more charming, or had "feminine intuition", et cetera. It strikes me as a case of boys talking to boys, about those mysterious beings who might you know, someday talk to them, but they were trying.

The last time D&D was published with different stats for male and female characters was the 70's. I don't recall a major game since the 80's that included them. In current popular culture, to postulate that women have superior attributes to men in certain areas is noncontroversial, but the reverse is frowned upon, for reasons too complicated to get into here.

Since at least my late teens, I've never seen a reason to include different attribute modifiers for male or female characters. Roleplaying games are about acting out power fantasies and as a general rule, I don't like things that hamper people's ability to act out their fantasy (those who participated in the monk thread can now rail at me for hypocrisy).

 

[mythago]

I'm sure some of them are. I've never felt the need to investigate which are which. I'm equal opportunity affirming and offensive, and no respecter of rank.

Some of us are, yes. That's not about "rank", whatever that's supposed to mean; it's an observation that women-in-gaming is, for many gamers, not an abstract discussion about somebody else.

WRT things like upper strength limits: unless a GM is trying to run a rigid historical simulation or some kind of Beyond Harn realistic modeling, certain things are going to be kept or discarded in the name of "realism" and mimicing what humans actually can and can't achieve. Few GMs, I'm guessing, require PCs to roll on the Burn Scars Table every time they survive a fireball, or cap hit points at a level that insures living through a 50' fall is a miraculous event and never 'yeah, pretty good odds'. Despite the fact that urination is an absolute biological fact of human existence, nobody has tables that instruct characters on how often they have to pee with CON rolls required for a character who forgot to go before they went into the dungeon.

Virtually all GMs who run D&D seem pretty happy with the preference for cinematic/heroic over realistic modeling - as we know from the fact that elves, magic missiles and worshippers of Pelor did not exist in actual 15th-century Europe. Rules systems, and individual GMs, decide to keep certain things as 'realistic' and important to the game, and reject other things as cumbersome, boring and unimportant. When a rules system, or a GM, insists that one of the things they must keep is strength differentiation between men and women, that is saying something about what is thought important, what does not detract from the game.

 

[Morrus]

I'll just say this: I wouldn't have much of a problem with reality-based limits placed on female PCs if male PCs were subject to reality-based modeling that took into account areas in which femaies routinely outperform males.

So here's why I personally find gender-based ability score limits creepy. YMMV, of course; I can only speak for myself:

Whether any demographic as a group routinely outperforms anybody isn't the issue (in the real world, or in the made-up one). The issue is whether this particular character can do so. Whatever the general makeup of the populace of a fantasy world, I think men laying down the law and saying "No, you may not play a physically strong woman!" is icky as all heck. A player character is a player character is a player character; if someone wants to play a woman who is incredibly strong, why the heck shouldn't they? Who's to say they shouldn't?

And that's ignoring the fact that we're playing in a world with elves and dragons and orcs and golems and vampires... but definitely no physically strong women! That's just too far!

That's why ability score limits for genders are creepy to me. If folks want to play incredibly strong women, the rules should not prevent them from doing so. And if the rules don't (as they rarely do - these are usually houserules), certainly no person should prevent another from doing so.

Fortunately, I've never encountered this in real life. It's just a phenomenon I hear about on the internet.

 

[Salamandyr]

EDIT: apologies, this post asked a question of Mythago that she answered in her comment, that I missed.

Crud...that was the last post of Morrus'. I'm confused. It doesn't matter.

Play games! Have fun.

 

[billd91]

The last time D&D was published with different stats for male and female characters was the 70's. I don't recall a major game since the 80's that included them. In current popular culture, to postulate that women have superior attributes to men in certain areas is noncontroversial, but the reverse is frowned upon, for reasons too complicated to get into here.

There's probably something lurking out there that does, but in the main, I think characteristic differences would be quite rare for default human characters. For non-human characters, you've got Traveller with the Aslan characters and their fairly extreme sex-based division of labor and social differences. But, then, they aren't human so the idea that males and females are very different is not so tightly linked to the sexism in gaming issue and becomes an interesting point of departure for working with an alien perspective. Plus it's fun to watch the player's face when the Aslan NPCs assume the human male engineer PC is female because of his job.

 

[Salamandyr]

Billd91, I imagine you're right, but I'm mostly thinking of major properties. I'm sure somebody out there is still producing FATAL, after all.

But it seems to me that judging gaming and gamers by the standards of a few creeps, (and every group of people will have creeps) is the same category error as judging all feminists by the actions of that crazy person who shot Andy Warhol.

It strikes me as cheap grace.

 

[Salamandyr]

So here's why I personally find gender-based ability score limits creepy. YMMV, of course; I can only speak for myself:

Whether any demographic as a group routinely outperforms anybody isn't the issue (in the real world, or in the made-up one). The issue is whether this particular character can do so. Whatever the general makeup of the populace of a fantasy world, I think men laying down the law and saying "No, you may not play a physically strong woman!" is icky as all heck. A player character is a player character is a player character; if someone wants to play a woman who is incredibly strong, why the heck shouldn't they? Who's to say they shouldn't?

And that's ignoring the fact that we're playing in a world with elves and dragons and orcs and golems and vampires... but definitely no physically strong women! That's just too far!

That's why ability score limits for genders are creepy to me. If folks want to play incredibly strong women, the rules should not prevent them from doing so. And if the rules don't (as they rarely do - these are usually houserules), certainly no person should prevent another from doing so.

Fortunately, I've never encountered this in real life. It's just a phenomenon I hear about on the internet.

That's a very unfair characterization of the argument. No one, not even the most ardent fan of strength limitations, is arguing against physically strong women. They argue, that physically strong women are not as strong as physically strong men, and the game should reflect that. I don't agree, but it's an arguable point.

For instance, the world record for the deadlift by a woman, one Becca Swanson, is 683 lbs. That's in incredible amount! I could maybe lift half that, probably closer to a third. She is dramatically stronger than me. But the world record for a man? Depending on how you calculate it, around 1100 lbs! That's about one and a half as much! Other weightlifting numbers show a similar disparity.

Again, I see no reason to impose every real world limit on fantasy characters. I prefer to abide by "action movie" realism. And it may be logically inconsistent for women being as strong as men to break a persons verisimilitude, when, say, a person being able to outthink a computer, or read people's minds doesn't. But it's not an inherent mark of sexism either.