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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5635698" data-attributes="member: 22424">Well, I don't believe that the setting should really be a single, homogenous place. There should be various races, nations and organisations, each with their own cultural norms and traditions.And I feel it's entirely reasonable for a given race/nation/organisation to have differentiated gender roles.However, I don't think it would be reasonable for the main (or only) culture in the setting to maintain and enforce such roles, except perhaps in a very short-term campaign. It's really not fair for the players of female characters (or, indeed, female players regardless of their character) to have to deal with endless sexism in what is supposed to be a pasttime, just because "that's the way the setting's built."(I don't excuse problem players who are "just playing my character". They created the character, and so they chose the problem behaviours; I expect them to choose otherwise, or play a different character. Likewise, if the DM encodes heavy sexism into his setting, saying "I'm just running my setting" is a poor excuse.I suppose that's the key thing right there: if the societies are sexist but the DM is not, that's probably fine. But if the DM is sexist, but using the game as a means to work out that sexism, that's the problem. I'm not sure quite where the dividing line lies, but I bet I'd know it when I saw it.)My preference, FWIW, is for the baseline setting to take a "Battlestar Galactica" approach to things: not only are there no fixed gender roles, but this isn't even remarked on by the characters. Of course a woman can be president/a fighter pilot/whatever! Of course a man can be a nurse/teacher/house-husband/whatever! But it is just that, a preference.For human characters, I'm going to say "no".The thing is, in 3e/4e/PF, stat modifiers really need to be +/-2 to be meaningful. But that's a relatively massive shift. The differences in strength between the genders are comparitively small.Consider this: men are stronger on average than women. But this is in large part because men are also taller and heavier than women on average. So, what happens if a player decides his human male will have an 18 Str, but that he will also assign him the lowest allowed height and weight values? Are you going to allow that, despite it being unrealistic? Or hit him with a penalty? If so, what penalty?It just opens up a huge can of worms, IMO. I'd much rather just leave it in the hands of the player: if he wishes his female fighter to be weaker than an equivalent male, he can choose to assign a lower strength. But if he wishes his female fighter to have maximum strength, well, she must just be an exception. No big deal.Things get a bit different when dealing with non-human characters. Obviously, there could be some species where the differences between the sexes are much more pronounced. (The bug-women in "Perdido Street Station" spring to mind.) However, for all of the PC races given in the PHB (all versions), I would imagine that this does not apply.</blockquote>

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