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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7174550" data-attributes="member: 4937">I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at all the directions this thread has taken.  Rapid fire takes.a) Reality isn't 'sexist'.  The value of women or men as persons isn't based on their ability scores.   Any of their ability scores.b) It's trivially true that the upper bounds of strength and athletic ability in men is much larger than women.  Every female athlete is aware of that and lives with that.  If you can't, well, reality isn't sexist.c) There are still women that can kick my butt.  For anything I do, there is some woman out there that is better than me.  Only a small percentage of men can claim otherwise.  d) I've never felt the need for upper bounds on strength on the basis of gender, because the practical upper bounds are generally much higher than starting PC's are allowed to reach.  And for PC's above these upper bounds, in a fantasy setting, you might as well be talking about characters like Wonder Woman, whose strength is not capped by any mortal maximum anyway.e) That said, I don't feel that having upper bounds for strength on the basis of gender would be sexist if the existed to reflect some gritty realistic campaign setting, such as say 17th century Europe or 16th century Japan.  For such a setting though, I'd probably prefer to use some sort of character burner strategy for chargen that would in fact produce characters whose abilities were strongly linked to their gender precisely because society forced persons down particular life paths and alternatives just weren't available.   Afterwards of course, the PC's lives could depart in any direction that the story led.  f) Even if reality isn't sexist, insisting on reality in a game can be sexist if the reason for doing so is actual belief in the inferiority of women or to belittle women.   g) The vast majority of RPGs are built around the core conceit that the single most important characteristic a person can have is martial prowess.  It is interesting to me that of all the things that could be important to a game, martial prowess is probably the one you could choose where men have a definite advantage over women.   Food for thought.h) Yet it's also true in the vast majority of settings that there are plenty of character archetypes that have exceptional martial prowess, but whose prowess doesn't depend on bulging muscles at all.  I find it interesting though that no one complains (or complains equally) about the fact that, for example, the rules provide for women to be stronger than men, because trading smaller muscles for (for example) greater magical aptitude would in most systems make choosing female characters something power gamers would (and do) do.   This isn't limited to my homebrew.   The inclusion of female characters into first person shooters has made power gamers in those games exclusively prefer female characters because the female character by being smaller (but otherwise exactly equal) to the male character has advantages in reduced visibility and even reduced hit box.i) There are plenty of men who validate the bulging muscles of fantasy women who are themselves sexist.  The ancient Greeks had a profoundly sexist culture, but they lusted after women with bulging muscles and martial prowess and made up stories about them.  They also thought the perfect woman would be a man with breasts.  I'm not particularly impressed by people who take up this topic about how sexist someone else is, when their idea of a non-sexist depiction of a woman seems to be a sexually aggressive, physically strong woman with the same tastes and preferences stereotypical of man.  Men with breasts, indeed.  Loving and admiring women as primarily as they exist in a fantasy as opposed to primarily as the exist in reality, is about the most sexist thing I can think of.</blockquote>

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