Ability and skill modifiers by gender

[ExploderWizard]

1E featured ability score modifiers for female PC of every race. It never added anything to the game then and I don't believe it would be any different now.

As a man I have no problems with female characters having the same range of stats and options as a male character of the same race. I don't really want to think about the mental insecurity that drives the desire to limit the capabilities of a fictional character based on gender.

 

[Dandu]

Sidetrack:

Why do D&D settings typically favor men when men and women have about as much aptitude towards channeling the True Power?

 

[kitcik]

Sidetrack:

Why do D&D favor men when men and women have about as much aptitude towards channeling the True Power?

What do clerics and wizards need with +1 Str anyways? It's fools' gold.

 

[Dandu]

Thinking about it... you could argue that the education system favors men, so wizards would be predominantly male. Alright, but one becomes a sorcerer by having a dragon boink one's grandmother, and that produces a child who can be either male or female. Furthermore, sorcerers powers spontaneously develop during puberty, so there's no question of training or not.

Bards? Seems like women would be able to play an instrument.

Druids, presumably, have no trouble with women. Indeed, for many of nature's creations, the female is stronger than the male. (Think: bears)

Holy orders would let in women if their deity is for it. Presumably, all those female deities would be ok with women serving. There are also male deities who have female clergy, such as Kord. (Check the Complete Champion for a Favored One of Kord.)

 

[Dandu]

That seemed unnecessary.

 

[Celebrim]

That seemed unnecessary.

I like how they think I'm the one being insulting.

I have a wife with a Ph.D and who can out run me. I have two daughters that are Star Wars geeks and who have more self-control than most EnWorld posters. My heroes include Temple Grandin, and its not easy to get on my heroes list. You don't get on it for being able to throw a ball well. I know who Leigh Ann Hester is and what she did and I knew about it and admired it long before she won a medal for it. It's not an admiration that I picked up to make someone happy or for some social or political reason. Just a few hours before this I was watching the Women's world cup, and I said, "Hope Solo... is a better person than I am."

But of the women I admire, there isn't a one of the that I do so because they are 'hot'. Not that some, like my wife, aren't 'hot', but its irrelevant to my admiration of them. The same is not true of any of the 'butt kicking' so called independent (although never really) heroines of fiction, and this is not coincidental.

When I raise my daughters, it will be with the hope that they don't look to Buffy for heroes or inspiration. It will be with the hope that they don't have to look to people who look like them for inspiration, but if they must or when they do, that it won't be in the form of thinking that to be valuable and valued they must do so either on chauvinist terms where the only things that are valuable are things men do or on the equally chauvinst terms of providing wish fulfillment for a man. That's not progress.

As for myself, I don't have to live in a fantasy world where men and women are the same with the same strengths and capabilities to hold them equal. Likewise, I don't have to equate female strength or value with physical appearance and sexual availability like just about every single Hollywood 'heroine' (if their are exceptions, I'm not aware of them but then again, I don't watch many movies or TV).

I find myself in the awkward position of finding myself unable to agree with the sexism of the so called 'feminists' who in these threads typically want to act like fundamentalist young Earthers and deny reality or with the sexism of the chauvinists who in these threads are typically just offering up tired old sterotypes.

Your initial video response could have been interesting, Dandu, if you'd avoided attacking the OP personally. That was also unnecessary.

Anyway, the thread is going the way I expected and will likely be closed soon. I just am curious how many of these outraged posters are sock puppets. (Though, looking up, its seems some have regained their composure, which is nice.)

 

[delericho]

What do you think?

That different ability score limits for male and female characters were a monumentally poor idea when Gygax first proposed them, and they're no better now.

That this game would benefit from less sexism encoded into it; it certainly doesn't need more.

That a player who wants their female character to be weaker than a man but more skilled with devices, or bluff, or whatever, has the option to assign ability scores and skill points accordingly.

But most importantly: while it is true that in the real world women are on average somewhat weaker than men, this is a game about heroes who are anything but average. If you're going to apply these modifiers and pretend they're somehow about 'realism', then I presume you're also going to eliminate all magic from the game, and all characters above about 3rd level?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

while it is true that in the real world women are on average somewhat weaker than men, this is a game about heroes who are anything but average.

To be 100% clear, I don't support the idea of gender-based stat mods. However, logically, this particular argument could be used to eliminate species-based stat mods as well. As in, "Sure, it is true that in the campaign world orc are on average somewhat stronger than humans, this is a game about heroes who are anything but average."

 

[Celebrim]

If you're going to apply these modifiers and pretend they're somehow about 'realism', then I presume you're also going to eliminate all magic from the game, and all characters above about 3rd level?

The first part of your post is something I can generally agree with or empathize with, although I suspect we'd disagree over the underlying reasons. I also think hard coding gender differences into the game is a bad idea (at least, I don't do it). I also think there is hard coded sexism in most RPGs, although where I find it probably won't be the same place you find it. I also think that if you want to create characters that fit a more a realistic model (as you see it) that you can do it within the constraints of the existing character creation system (not that I think the existing character creation system is flexible enough). And yes, the fantasy game does not have to be about modelling any particular aspect of reality.

But you totally undermine your point when you conclude it with a logical fallacy like the quoted text. It does not follow that a desire for realism in any aspect of the game conflicts with a setting containing magic or characters above 3rd level. Would you make the same comments regarding a poster trying to come up with realistic values for hardness of different sorts of stone or metal? If someone complained under the rules that stone walls were mechanically nearly as easy to tear up as tissue paper, and that he wanted mechanics that didn't allow characters to dig through walls with their bare hands, answering that person with, "Oh, and I suppose you don't want magic too! Why should stone have realistic hardness in a world with magic!" would be an obvious logical fallacy.

Changing the context doesn't make it less so.

One of the basic assumptions of almost all fantasy literature is that however different the world may be from our own in some particular regards like the existance of dragons or the reality of the four classical elements, it otherwise is familiar to the reader. This is a necessary assumption. If the world doesn't work in a way that is familiar to the reader, then its very hard for the reader to follow and empathize with and even harder for the gamer to play within. So the assumption is, unless otherwise stated, everything about the game world would in some at least casual way work just like the real world.

In my own games, I explain this to my players as follows. The physics of the game world are radically different than the real world. There literally are 4 elements. Things don't fall because of gravity. They fall because earth spirits drag them to the ground. If you were to perform very close scientific experiments in the game world, they would have very different results than in the real world. For example, perhaps if you grind a cannon long enough, it eventually stops producing additional heat. However, if you only casually observe the world, it will seem to work exactly how you'd expect it to work. This is not a contridiction. Many very smart people believed in theories about the world that turned out on close inspection not to be true in this world for centuries. So, if in the game world your character believes in gravity, he'd be totally wrong, but without very close observation there would be no way for him to know it.

So the existance of magic in no way directly implies that human sexual dimorphism doesn't exist in the game world. It only stops existing when the setting explicitly references the difference between the real world and the fantasy world. If a person doesn't want to explicitly have that difference between the real world and the fantasy world, it in no fashion implies that they are sexist. They might be, but we can't know from that alone. In fact, its entirely possible that desiring the fantasy world to differ from reality in that way is a sign of sexism. After all, which is worse, desiring reality in your fantasy, or claiming that women can be the equal of men but only in a fantasy world

 

[delericho]

To be 100% clear, I don't support the idea of gender-based stat mods. However, logically, this particular argument could be used to eliminate species-based stat mods as well. As in, "Sure, it is true that in the campaign world orc are on average somewhat stronger than humans, this is a game about heroes who are anything but average."

Indeed. And, in fact, since we've moved away from "roll stats in order" to "arrange to taste" or point-buy methods, I might well argue that the time for these modifiers has passed. Barring the extreme ends of the scale (the Dex 20 halfling), these mods don't really seem to gain us anything.

(Also, of course: in 3e orcs aren't somewhat stronger on average; they are much stronger on average.)