Oh my god, allowing male and female characters in Dungeons and Dragons to be equally competent at any class they choose is not 'corrosive, woman-hating nonsense.'
I didn't say it was. I did explain what I thought was woman hating nonsense, and I didn't mention Dungeons and Dragons or classes once in that explanation.
And - like I said - you know that's nonsense.
You keep saying that. I wonder what your basis of thinking so. You clearly won't believe me, so lets consider the circumstantial evidence.
I'm a known Tolkien-phile, right down to my chosen forum name. I've tons of posts on Tolkien. One of the things I've claimed is that the value of a person, or of a hero, shouldn't depend on the male chauvinist idea that a persons worth is defined by their martial prowess. So is that the sort of thing you'd expect a fan of Tolkien to actually really believe, given that Tolkien often chose as heroes small, meek, characters whose martial prowess was significantly inferior to other characters in the story?
For years I've been arguing that games generally and RPGs in particular are art forms, and are literature, and that we as game fans and game designers ought to be aspiring to elevate our games and the stories within them to greater artistry and ever higher aspirations. That we ought to, as with other sorts of literary mediums, be engaging with serious ideas, and be striving toward meaningful and beautiful stories, which are coherent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. So doesn't it seem likely given that, that I'd reject arguments out right that claim that games have no relationship to reality, that they are mere escapism, and that they are only about fun, and that games are inherently just fantasy after all?
That's not what anyone is saying. They are saying that codifying this inequality into the rule-set of Dungeons and Dragons means that you are limiting the archetypes that female characters can excel at.
If that's all that was being said here, we'd have nothing to disagree about. I also agree with that statement, and have said repeatedly that I don't see any value for D&D in gender based strength caps or forcing someone to apply gender based attribute modifiers to a character just because they want to play a woman (or a man, for that matter).
But I did want to test the waters, to see what principle was being pushed for here. That is to say, were people saying that having characters that are inherently different because of their gender just didn't suit the goals and style of game that D&D was going for, or were they saying things like that it was morally wrong for any possible game to have differences between men and women.
So I tried out some questions to see what people were really thinking. I for example said, what if we had a chargen system that resulted in you playing a real person, with that real persons capabilities. People actually went so far as to suggest that if they were forced to play a real woman, that that would be sexist. To justify these sorts of opinions, people have suggested that RPGs can only be fantasies, or that they can only be escapist, or that they cannot have a relationship to reality.
Because here's what you're twisting up - you're taking a statement like "female and male characters should not have sex-based limits or penalties on their attributes in the D&D rule-set" and mechanical statements like, "penalizing female characters' stats makes them less optimal choices for many classes" and trying to turn that into some kind of commentary on the real world. In other words, taking an affirmation of in-game equality, and trying to twist it into "insisting on equal stats for male and female characters in D&D is the real sexism"
To note that people have insisted that any game whatsoever cannot be based on reality, because if it were based on reality, women would be inferior and undesirable choices as characters - which people in this thread have actually insisted - is not me twisting anything.
Lets try an example of a hypothetical fantasy game. Suppose we've got the 'Game of Thrones' RPG, and the chargen system allows you to play any character that appears in the game of thrones world - but critically not any sort of character that does not appear in it. You are only allowed to play the sorts of characters that have perfect verisimilitude to the chosen game world. So, you could play powerful women. You could play Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons. You could play Arya Stark or Sansa Stark. You could even play Brienne of Tarth, a powerful warrior woman. What you could not play is a female Gregor Clegane, because the setting is a gritty setting which while fantastic in many ways is still heavily informed by real world medieval history, particularly the War of the Roses, and while their are many very capable women, none of them are remotely the physically strongest characters in the story world. And women in the setting often suffer from the sort of historical mistreatment and degrading treatment that real women in history often suffered (of course, men also often suffer the sort of historical abuse and degrading treatment that real men often suffered as well). And even Brienne of Tarth is not the most potent melee combatant in the story. But is martial prowess the real measure of the character anyway? Tyrion Lanister is considered by many the best character in the story, and he's not defined by his superior strength or superior martial prowess.
Is such a game inherently uninteresting? Is such a game inherently unattractive? Is such a game inherently unfair? Is it inherently sexist, or at least, more sexist than the story itself is (I'm not hugely familiar with the story, so I'd accept that it actually is sexist, though it seems to be quite popular with many women nonetheless).
Or lets consider an example of a hypothetical police procedural RPG, intended to be highly realistic. The chargen system in this game is that you had to play yourself. Your characters strength score was derived from a combination of your grip strength, bench press, and leg press. Your character's body mass and height were the same as your own. Would this game be inherently sexist or inherently valueless as a game, because the female players would be inherently disadvantaged in certain ways?
Here - let me give you an example.
Your strawman sucks, and has no bearing on the discussion.
