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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7175320" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not quite sure that I understand what you mean about that.  I think however we are mostly in agreement.   Combat is one of the major pillars of D&D.   As such, as long as we are talking about melee combat or even just the potential of melee combat, then strength plays a major role in what makes a character valuable to have and capable of participating in that major pillar.  It is the fact that we see the game as revolving around combat that makes strength such an important character attribute.  It's also true that D&D isn't much like real life and only has some small relationship to reality.I'm not going to make a big assumption about what appeals to male and female gamers, nor am I going to assume that either male or female gamers will play characters with the same gender that they identify as.   Nor do I necessary believe it to be one of the goals of the game that they should want to do so.I'm quite cognizant of that.  I'm also not sure it matters as much as you think it does.  To back up a bit, I've never found the need for strength caps or strength penalties for genders in D&D.   In fact, in some what of a twist, I'm pretty sure in my 3.X homebrew the pure power gaming approach would be an all female party of spellcasters, because there is an optional trait called 'Fairer Sex' that is only available to female characters, that gives you -4 STR, +2 WIS, +2 CHR, and in 3.X (and D&D generally) treating strength as a dump stat and engaging in combat by avoiding melee and using magic is generally a very effective approach.   I'm pretty sure at least one power gamer is playing a female character specifically to have 'Fairer Sex' as a trait, because charisma casters are very potent in my game.   In a similar way, pure power gamers play Skyrim with female characters, because there is an earnable trait that gives you a bonus in damage to members of the opposite sex and their are more male NPCs than female NPCs.   So within the imagined fantasy worlds, being male is an objective disadvantage.But I don't think we are required to think that a game that is more about reality than D&D requires we have unrealistic characters in order for that game to be interesting.   And some people here seem to be saying that realistic women are inherently inferior and so it is wrong to present women in a way that is realistic.   Or to put it more bluntly, there are some here that seem to be embracing the value judgments of old fashioned male chauvinists, and instead of rejecting those value judgments as wrong, are insisting that life really is about strength, martial prowess, and ability to breed and so we must pretend that women have these features equally with men before we can view women as valuable.   And then from that they seem to reason that any game which doesn't have women not only identical in value to men, but also having women equal to ability to men in all areas is inherently sexist.   That is to say, they seem to be asserting that if you perceive a difference between men and women, it's inherently sexist.   The problem with that is both that it accept the values of male chauvinism in the first place, and then tops it off by requiring to you be delusional about how reality actually is, rather than saying that they are in fact delusional for thinking that life is primarily about melee combat and athletic ability.  But in D&D, purely as a hypothetical, the game is certainly not purely or primarily about melee combat anyway as a matter of objective fact.</blockquote>

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