When Fantasy meets Medieval Europe

[Thomas Bowman]

Here are the Warrior Character sheets, I decided to do one for a Male Warrior and another for a female Warrior. the Female has slightly better ability scores, since I had to up her strength from 8 to 11 so she can carry all her equipment and armor.

Made the female human warrior a little taller than the commoner with more of an athletic build.
And this is the male human warrior:

 

[CapnZapp]

long reply is long

Then stat them up as Commoners.

There's no need to differentiate between the miniscule differences of a "strength-based commoner" and a "dex-based commoner". They all have +0 in every ability and skill. If one is a blacksmith, give him (or her) advantage. If another is a basketweaver, give her (or him) advantage. Simple.

The point is that it was a long time ago the rules proscribed strength differences between the sexes.

If you want to describe the male commoners as stronger and the female commoners as faster, that's your call and I have no beef with that.

But you're going further than that - you're encoding gender into the stat blocks, and I'm calling you out on it.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Then stat them up as Commoners.

There's no need to differentiate between the miniscule differences of a "strength-based commoner" and a "dex-based commoner". They all have +0 in every ability and skill. If one is a blacksmith, give him (or her) advantage. If another is a basketweaver, give her (or him) advantage. Simple.

The point is that it was a long time ago the rules proscribed strength differences between the sexes.

If you want to describe the male commoners as stronger and the female commoners as faster, that's your call and I have no beef with that.

But you're going further than that - you're encoding gender into the stat blocks, and I'm calling you out on it.

There are no specific rules that say men are stronger than women, these are NPCs, player characters don't have to adhere to them. You can have a female player character with a strength of 18, but in this world, on average women won't be as strong as men. Player characters don't have to be average. As for stat blocks, I figure I'm not going to bother, the character sheets have all the information you need to use them as NPCs, their purpose is to add a layer of realism. Women warriors are unusual, they are above average, is that a problem? A woman who picks up a sword and wants to be a soldier has got to accept that in the ranks they will be out numbered by men, that is just how it is, right or wrong. NPCs and PCs are different. With PCs their are no rules separating the sexes as far as combat stats go, and if your player character encounter some human NPCs, they might want to know if they have names and what gender they are, so the players can form a picture of them in their minds, thus making the game session seem more real to them.

If you have an army of soldiers where exactly 50% of them are women and 50% are men, where does this happen? Not in the real world. Not in the United States, not in any country I know of. Some women want to be soldiers, but most women do not. I'm not saying they shouldn't be, I believe it is up to them, that is just my experience after talking to many women. I've talked to a few female soldiers, and I can tell you that it was really special to meet them, I respect what they are doing for the country, and I appreciate their sacrifice. I am just trying to be realistic. Medieval Europe was a certain way, that is history, I can't change it, but I am trying to bring out a little of that atmosphere, it adds to the drama more, than to have unrealistic absolute equality between the sexes in medieval times. I am sorry, but there is something unusual about a woman wearing plate mail armor on the back of a horse, it is the exception to the rule that draw attention and makes people famous.

This is a site rarely seen in the middle ages, this is Joan of Arc, most women didn't do this, but Joan did! is it wrong for me to acknowledge that fact that this is unusual? Should I have half the knights in my campaign be women? What do you think? In my campaign unicorns do exist, just like women warriors in a suit of plate mail, are they a common site? Not really, but that makes them all the more special!

 

[CapnZapp]

another long reply

What I'm telling you is, that specifying gender for stat blocks is something to avoid.

This leaves the interpretation and presentation up to each DM, without forcing them to go against the written material.

It's not about you making women warriors in your campaign special and rare; it's about you enforcing that view on others.

What you do in your private life is one thing, but since you want to make a public contribution, you need to hear that is no longer appreciated.

I suggest you look closely at how WotC presents NPCs nowadays.

Let me take a recent example from Tomb of Annihilation: in the snake headquarters in Omu, the bad guy has a harem. In previous years this would surely be presented as filled with beautiful women, including long loving description of their unclothed bodies.

This is no longer the case. Read the text closely and you'll find that it carefully avoids specifying the appearance and gender of the sex slaves.

This allows each DM to decide for him or herself whether the bad guy is into men, women or both. Or other.

It goes without saying that most DMs will assume he's heterosexual and that the harem consists of women but the adventure text does not enforce that, and doesn't force DMs with other tastes to go against the written text.

You should de-gender your status blocks and leave it up to the DM.

This will probably mean most campaigns will still feature strong and brawny men and dexterous and charismatic women (including mine) but leave that choice to the DM , is what I'm telling you is the modern design choice.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Okay, that sounds reasonable, Here are the new character sheets:

Commoner, Archer

Commoner, Spearman

Warrior, Archer

Warrior, Swordsman

It was very simple to do, I just erased the words "Male" and "Female" from the Gender blank lines in each sheet. Now the DM can fill them in as he or she wishes, how is that? Of course everything else about the stats are the same. Archers are a little shorter, and weaker than the melee people are, they stand back and fire arrows at the enemy while the stronger and brawnier people fight in hand to hand combat, and hopefully they don't get shot with an arrow in the back.

 

[Lylandra]

while you're at it (and this is why I bluntly made my statement earlier): Don't do obvious mis-statting when you're using NPC with elite arrays. Your "Archer" has no reason to have 15 Cha. Unless it is an archer leader, which charisma implies. An archer would have 15 Dex. And no Str 8 either. Because - and you often quote the "realism - you need a certain strength to pull a bowstring.

Same thing with commoner-ing. A real, medieval, rural commoner with Str 8 wouldn't fare too well. They do bodily work all the time. And Str is a trained thing. Also, you'd either be a hunter OR a farmer. Profession implies a certain amount of specialization.

As an advice: If you wish to have your setting make sense, then 1) read up about real medieval life. In scientific textbooks.
And 2) think about cause and effect. I know, it is un-historic for a real historian to do linear cause-effect-chains (it's far more complicated that that!), but right now I don't see a causal, red line in your setting besides "that's how I want it to be" and "this is my interpretation of medieval Europe".

And playing in a setting that doesn't seem to make too much sense in terms of internal consistency isn't for everyone.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

while you're at it (and this is why I bluntly made my statement earlier): Don't do obvious mis-statting when you're using NPC with elite arrays. Your "Archer" has no reason to have 15 Cha. Unless it is an archer leader, which charisma implies. An archer would have 15 Dex. And no Str 8 either. Because - and you often quote the "realism - you need a certain strength to pull a bowstring.

Same thing with commoner-ing. A real, medieval, rural commoner with Str 8 wouldn't fare too well. They do bodily work all the time. And Str is a trained thing. Also, you'd either be a hunter OR a farmer. Profession implies a certain amount of specialization.

As an advice: If you wish to have your setting make sense, then 1) read up about real medieval life. In scientific textbooks.
And 2) think about cause and effect. I know, it is un-historic for a real historian to do linear cause-effect-chains (it's far more complicated that that!), but right now I don't see a causal, red line in your setting besides "that's how I want it to be" and "this is my interpretation of medieval Europe".

And playing in a setting that doesn't seem to make too much sense in terms of internal consistency isn't for everyone.

I appreciate your advice, I had to look in the Monster Manual to get the more common array of ability scores, they are 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, for a warrior, the minimum strength needs to be 11 to carry all the equipment, probably the 12 would go for intelligence, as I want to get that +1 to preserve the skill set, 13 would go for Dexterity, so I got three ability scores left, that would be Constitution, Wisdom, and Charisma, so Lylandra, if it was you, how would you arrange those scores? Lets imagine this is a farmer's wife protecting her homestead from attacking orcs, her husband is away, and she has children. the orcs are attacking the village. How would you arrange those scores so she would be the best help to the community in fighting off those orcs?

There are two cases, the Warrior and the commoner. the Warrior has a longbow, the commoner has a shortbow, they don't want to get into a melee with those orcs, so their aim is to kill them before they get close. I think the commoner doesn't wear armor, because she is not a warrior. the commoner stands 5'3" tall, while the warrior is a more muscular woman that stands at 5'6" tall with a more athletic build. the community needs everyone they can get to fend off the orc attack, even children are pressed into service, lets say 13 years old and up.

 

[Lylandra]

Okay, so a medieval commoner who'd go with a high dex/bow user build? And I got 13, 12,11,10,9,8?

Str 10, Dex 13, Con 12, Wis 11, Int 9, Cha 8. Maybe change Con and Wis if you're more of a hunter. But you'd get Wis once you reach middle age anyway. These people are neither educated, nor are they natural leaders.

The archer warrior would prolly have Str 11, Dex 13, Con 12, mental stats as you'd wish to arrange. Could change Con to a 10, but that wouldn't be a hardy warrior.

But I wouldn't shy away to make these farmer women stronger, melee-oriented combatants as they are typically out in the fields, doing hard work all the day while the young kids are looked after by the elderly. Because in medieval times there was no such thing as a nuclear family, especially not in rural areas

Children would have very different stats. Especially far lower Str.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

A 13-14 year old boy would probably be the equivalent of his mother in combat statistics, since he is not fully grown, though I think maybe his mom would be a better shot with the bow, since she had longer to practice her archery skills. The boy would probably be armed with a sharp edged farming implement and a dagger. a 15-16 year old boy would be bigger and stronger than his younger brother, his sister, also 15-16 years old would have a knife and a short bow.

 

[Lylandra]

I doubt that. If you take the middle ages' nourishment standard, then kids would hit puberty and the corresponding change in hormones ~2-3 years later than today. And even I would totally thrash 13-14yo boys today who already got their testosterone levels increased in a fight.

And that is only if you'd really want to go there and try to mix D&D and RL biology and physics which is really not what the system is meant for. Or even remotely good at.