D&D 5E 5e's new gender policy - is it attracting new players?

[bookwormbabe29]

To Thecosmic kid: You missed several key words in my post. For example, I said Trans people were OFTEN treated with more respect, not that discrimination never happened at all. The Muslim faith can be quite harsh on anyone not clearly male, including straight women. In terms of modern tolerance, that is a really extreme example. Also? I never said it was 'normal' so kindly don't put words in my mouth. I said 'treated with more respect.' If you're going to say I'm wrong, please understand what I am saying before you do so, and then do some research.

And if you want to nitpick over the modern transgender term being 'new' you could say the same thing about being straight, as a straight 'identity' only came about in contrast to gay, lesbian, trans, etc, 'identities' in modern media. Of course straight people existed, but this 'identity' is new, etc, etc. It's essentially meaningless, only serving to be divisive. No one needs that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

A good thing to remember- our present will be someone else's past.

Also, I might note the whole, "No politics, no religion" rule here. Given that this thread has veered into interesting territory, I think everyone has done a wonderful job keeping it informative and civil.

I agree. I don't know if TheCosmicKid is an atheist or not, but if so his post #462 certainly does atheists credit. Points for intellectual integrity.

For the purpose of your Darwinian argument, what's the difference?

It's the difference between me putting my foot in my mouth by phrasing my point inartfully in a way which renders it vulnerable to nitpicking, vs. undermining my actual point with new data that I didn't have before. What's that quote? "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'" If you know of an ant species in which the predominant form of coupling is sterile couplings between workers, I would find that quite fascinating to learn about. To my knowledge, no such species exists Edit: in a stable population equilibrium.

(Pre-emptive nitpick): edited to add qualifier because modern humans do seem to engage in sterile couplings, perhaps predominantly, especially after the invention of cheap birth control. We haven't had time yet to see what kind of effect that has on selective pressures.

From a Darwinian perspective, hive colonies are fascinating, but so is the fact that the somatic tissue in eukaryotes is content to let the gonadal tissue do all the reproduction most of the time. (Canine venereal sarcoma is the exception here--the interesting thing is that most cellular tissues do not adopt this strategy.) There's no fitness penalty for the ants in this case because all the reproduction is channeled through a specialized phenotype, the queen, who ensures that all the other phenotypes propagate to the next generation. You know perfectly well that I didn't intend to refer to specialized species in my claim. If you're just nitpicking, consider me nitpicked--I phrased my point incautiously and you scored a point. Yes, there are plenty of species for which asexuality is predominant or universal.

BTW, if you're not familiar with canine venereal sarcoma, here's a fascinating read: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/cell-line-infections-or-my-dog-has-no-bones/

Although its phenotype differs considerably from dogs (no brain, no bones, no eyes, no fur, asexual) classification by descent clearly implies that it is a canid and mammal – certainly the most unusual mammal ever discovered.

 

[MostlyDm]

tl;dr: The past is complicated and usually awful.

Oh man, so well said.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

And if you want to nitpick over the modern transgender term being 'new' you could say the same thing about being straight, as a straight 'identity' only came about in contrast to gay, lesbian, trans, etc, 'identities' in modern media. Of course straight people existed, but this 'identity' is new, etc, etc. It's essentially meaningless, only serving to be divisive. No one needs that.

Exactly. Modern Americans (and presumably all Westerners) are weird about "sexual identity."

The Romans, as has been pointed out earlier in this thread, classified people not based on whom you want to do things with but rather on what it is you want to do to them. That's pretty different from the modern classification scheme.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Try again without the strawman. It doesn't help to disagree with something that wasn't actually said.

No strawman intended. I may have spoken in an unclear manner, however, for which I apologize.
I was simply saying that homosexuality is not necessarily an evolutionarily negative trait. It was intended in direct response to your statement that it is.

The level of error in your post

I'm not an atheist, first of all. Don't make assumptions about people, especially ones that seem to assume that only christians and atheists exist.

Second, nothing you posted about Rome refutes what I said, so....what?
Nero, yes, was known for persecuting Christians. I never even denied that they were persecuted in Rome. All i sad was that some of the stories about said persecution were complete fabrications. Which they were.

And more importantly, like I said, what the Romans did 2k years ago is largely irrelevant to a discussion of the modern western world. By the fall of Rome, Christianity was the singular power in all Roman regions, and gaining ground (and actively persecuting other faiths) elsewhere. They went on to murder-convert pagans across Europe, only staying the blade when someone was savvy enough to use trade pressure and the threat of violence instead.

No one has claimed that Christians have never been persecuted. Only that they are not persecuted in the modern western world.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

To Thecosmic kid: You missed several key words in my post. For example, I said Trans people were OFTEN treated with more respect, not that discrimination never happened at all. The Muslim faith can be quite harsh on anyone not clearly male, including straight women. In terms of modern tolerance, that is a really extreme example. Also? I never said it was 'normal' so kindly don't put words in my mouth. I said 'treated with more respect.' If you're going to say I'm wrong, please understand what I am saying before you do so, and then do some research.

Your words were, "the whole nonsense of discrimination is a relatively 'new' thing from a historical point of view". That's what I was responding to. If I misinterpreted that in some way, I apologize.

Is it possible that you owe discosoc a similar apology? That he might not have been saying what you thought he was saying? Something to think about.

And if you want to nitpick over the modern transgender term being 'new' you could say the same thing about being straight, as a straight 'identity' only came about in contrast to gay, lesbian, trans, etc, 'identities' in modern media. Of course straight people existed, but this 'identity' is new, etc, etc.

Yes, I could say that. And certainly if someone else says that "straight identity is a modern thing", the principle of charitable reading suggests that I interpret their statement in this manner, at least until they say something else incompatible with it. It's better than assuming they just said something silly.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

If you're just nitpicking, consider me nitpicked--I phrased my point incautiously and you scored a point.

Score!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No strawman intended. I may have spoken in an unclear manner, however, for which I apologize.
I was simply saying that homosexuality is not necessarily an evolutionarily negative trait. It was intended in direct response to your statement that it is.

Okay, let me rephrase and let's see if I can make a statement that both of us will agree on.

Obligate homosexuality (as opposed to omnivorous bisexuality) has negative implications for fitness, but that does not necessarily imply that the overall phenotype has a net fitness penalty even if the trait has a genetic basis (which is not a foregone conclusion). Some negative alleles can be tied, loosely or tightly, to other positive alleles with positive implications, especially if the genetic prevalence, penetrance, or expressivity is low or if the allele's positive effects are very strong. The classic example is sickle-cell anemia, which drastically reduces life expectancy for homozygotes but confers malarial resistance to heterozygotes, increasing their life expectancy. In an environment where malaria is a risk factor, an equilibrium (crudely speaking) occurs when the sickle-cell trait is just common enough to minimize sickle-cell and malarial deaths combined, instead of optimizing either one separately. This is an example of a balanced polymorphism, where multiple alleles co-exist within a population without any of them reaching fixation. One explanation for the paradox of obligate homosexuality is that homosexual behavior, in humans or other animals, may be an outgrowth of a balanced polymorphism. Researchers are actively pursuing this possibility.

Additionally, Darwinian "fitness" has no special moral implications. Something can have negative implications for Darwinian "fitness" even if it is unequivocally a positive trait for individuals that possess it. (Arguably "higher education" falls into this category, although we haven't finished watching that one play out yet and won't for several centuries.)

Agree/disagree? Are there any parts of that statement that are wrong in your eyes?

 

[Wik]

I think you've failed to adequately summarised the wording or intention of the section on sex in the PH. The actual paragraph is more nuanced and considered;

Which is why I said I was summarizing. It took 447 posts in a huge thread before someone decided I needed to be a lot more specific in what was a one sentence summary. It was never meant to be a full-on interpretation - just a snippet from someone who didn't want to make a long post even longer by a full quoting of a section of rules that everyone already knew about.

But for all that, I almost entirely agree with you. About the only thing I disagree with is worldbuilding - I believe that the PCs should have a very strong ability to affect the undetailed parts of the world, and, point of fact, I let player creations exist in my world quite often. It means that the world I have now is one that I have fully created, but, paradoxically, is one I would never create on my own.

And I think if someone sits down at a table and says "okay, I'm a trans elf", and the GM decides that transgender elves shouldn't be a thing, and tries to make that character's choice be a difficult one in the game, well, the GM might want to rethink his use of time. This is a game, and using the setting to force players to "explore" issues is not something I particularly enjoy.

This happened in the 90s a lot, with female gamers playing female PCs. There were so many forum articles in DRAGON about how it was the GM's duty to let the PCs "explore" what it was like to be female in a male-dominated world, and to overcome prejudices and blah blah blah.

I disagree.

It's the GM's job to run a game that is fun for everyone sitting at the table. "Exploring" social issues is only something that should be done if the people involved want that to be there. Otherwise, throw it in the trash can, EVEN if you're playing, say, a semi historical game set in medieval europe. If a player wants to play a female knight, or a transgender roman soldier, well, do it. It's just a game.

 

[Umbran]

Folks,

Let's be clear about something - there are gamers for whom the gender policy is relevant. So, we allow some discussion of gender policy, even if it leans a little to the political.

This does *NOT* extend to this being an open forum (and field day) for commenting on, say, religion, or larger political movements.

In here, you need to keep the discussion tightly focused on *gamers*. If you want to include more broad commentary on religion and how it relates, you'll have to take it to the Off Topic forum, in a thread specifically labelled as Religion or Politics.

We kn ow that does restrict the discussion somewhat. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. Please play by the rules. Thanks.