Dude, this is a bucket of nonsense, and I think you know it.
It's not a bucket of nonsense, or at least, my response to it is not a bucket of nonsense. I have a daughter that is a soccer player. The corrosive woman hating crap you've been spreading in this thread is the sort of thing that has impacted my daily life. So no, I'm dead serious about this subject.
First, we're talking game design.
Yes, but what's going on is now you are insisting this corrosive woman hating nonsense has to inform every single game else it is "sexist". But let me back up and explain myself.
Increasingly in our society we are trying to be affirming of women, and that's all to the good. But, unfortunately, increasingly the touchstone of how we are affirming to women is to show women not as they are, but solely as the exist in a fantasy that is either unrealistic or simply not available to 999,999 out of every million women. That touchstone is that we portray women as "kick butt" action heroes, and not merely kick butt action heroes, but specifically as persons who despite weighing 130 pounds can wade into a room full of burly men and toss them around without any real effort. This portrayal is increasingly not confined even to fantasies like "Wonder Woman", but is pervading more and more of fiction, including fiction that is ostensibly realistic.
And there is nothing wrong with "kick butt" girl as escapist fantasy, but as it becomes increasingly the universal depiction of what it means to be an empowered woman - indeed as what it means to be a valued and valuable woman - it's increasingly striking me as being actually disparaging of real women, because in reality no woman can actually meet that standard. Worse, kick butt action girl almost invariably still looks exactly like a Barbie doll. So now I have to put up with this sort of crap becoming the standard that my very real daughters are judging themselves by because its the standard that they see being defined for women.
And so yes, I'm rather bothered by this crap, especially as I see it pushed more and more as a universal standard for what makes something sexist or not sexist (which is as much to say what makes it actually moral).
In D&D the game, a character's Strength score directly informs their capability as warriors. If there are caps or penalties on womens' Strength scores, that will directly influence their mechanical competence as warriors. This is not a philosophical discussion; it's a direct result of the mechanics laid out.
First of all, that's irrelevant. The thrust of my question was do all RPGs have to conform to permitting this escapist fantasy, else they ought to be condemned as sexist. Second of all, melee warrior is not the only way to contribute as a D&D character. Vastly more characters at my table treat Strength as a convenient dump stat than as an essential feature anyway. So, lets say the game isn't D&D, would it be fine if for whatever reason if you wanted to play as a female character, you had to find an alternative approach to contributing in combat than assuming you were the strongest person in the room? Because, out in the real world, real female police officers really do have to deal with this real life, and really don't have to have their ego's petted about being just as strong as men to value themselves as police officers and women. So to me, if you are insisting that the game has to do this because of some excuse like "escapist fantasy" (which is a crappy excuse), you are devaluing actual real women because you prefer fantasy women to real ones.
"Should an RPG feel fair?" Um, yeah?
Why? Seriously. Why? Stop giving me this axiomatic crap like it doesn't need an answer, because I think that it's far from obvious that an RPG - which is a cooperative pastime - has to feel "fair" in the sense you are using the word. It's not even clear to me that not being able to be the strongest character in the game because you are female isn't "fair", because in the real world you just can't, and it's certainly not clear to me that every RPG has to not be informed by reality. But to the extent that RPGs must not be informed by this particular reality, again it strikes me that you are devaluing real women because you prefer fantasy ones.
Literally nobody is saying this. Literally nobody.
Let me reinforce this again. I believe if you are saying, "Female characters have to be allowed to be just strong as men, otherwise they are unattractive as a choice", that what you are saying is equivalent to saying "women aren't as good as men". And there does seem to be a lot of people who are saying, "Female characters have to be allowed to be just strong as men, otherwise they are unattractive as a choice", so I am hearing a lot of people saying "women aren't as good as men". Challenge me on that equivalency as you like, but do not assume I am not being serious.
