Lots of things. The table of world record clean and jerks by weight and gender would be one of many objective examples.
I'll give you an ancedotal one though that was more impactful to me. When I was in high school, we had the best girls basketball team in the state.
You picked the weakest of all possible examples. Girls do not compete at basketball at anywhere near the rate boys do. Smaller recruiting pool. Further, there is a good chance many of the girls, before joining HS basketball, had played little, or mainly with other boys. It is quite possible that "random guys in the gym" actually have more hours on the court than many of the girls on the court (probably not the star players). Plus, basketball has a big height thing going for it. Women are shorter. Once you factor in the smaller recruiting pool on top of that, you get a vastly shorter basketball team.
Basically, you are doing the Billie Jean King comparison. The idea here is that if you can find one female who excels a man in some atheletic competition, then it proves the physical equality of the sexes.
That is not at all what I'm doing. What I'm doing is providing an example of a "female fighter" and showing she can perform credibly. She was even able to bull rush and out-grapple her opponent. In D&D terms, she would likely be flatly stronger.
This is a false test on any number of grounds not the least of which is that gender equality is not based on the idea of physical equality. But of course, such fights are rigged. The best women's tennis player in the world is better than 99.9% of all male tennis players, but probably not rank in the top 500 players in the world in mixed competition.
Right. But here's the thing. The top 500 players have probably
less than a +1 difference in skill over the next 5000. There are days Tiger Woods gets out-golfed that day somebody has never heard of. Why? Because he's in a credibly close range with Tiger. But he could never be Tiger, because he's not going to win over and over and over again. The very highest levels of an athletic competition involve not only skill but luck and razor thin margins of victory.
Furthermore, athletic competitions are very controlled settings, which are going to really magnify differences, because you can control variables to a very high degree. The less controlled the setting, the less you can optimize in very particular ways.
(BTW, the same is not true of say running a Marathon or some other sport where strength and consequently sprint speed are less important. Move out a bit farther to ultra-marathons that depend on having very high percentages of slow muscle to high muscle, and women actually can often out compete men.)
Which by that measure, would women a higher Con. However, it seems unlikely women have more hit points.
It's well known that the reason you don't see say the Serena sisters doing exhibition matches against men is that it would be just as embarassing as the pickup match with my HS girls basketball team was. Now, it ought not be embarassing, because our esteem of a what they accomplish shouldn't be diminished by the fact that they aren't men. But it is embarassing because we have to maintain this mystique around the notion that they 'could beat the boys'. The same is true of the US Women's National Soccer team (which BTW I love to watch). They are the best in the world, but they'd be hard pressed against a quality boy's high school team. That shouldn't diminish them (they are a whole lot better than I am), but for some reason for most people it does.
If they were countries, the men's soccer league would the USA, and the women's soccer league would be Jamaica.
So, you post a video of the two time women's world Champion Muay Thai fighter fighting some random scrub who could probably beat me up but who isn't ranked in the top 5000 male MMA and you expect that that makes some impression on me? Seriously?
Can you take her? You want to arm wrestle her?
Moreover, a match of that sort has already equalized one of the two great disadvantages that a female fighter would find outside of the ring. Sport combat ensures that the fighters are of nearly equal size. So she matched up against another person near to her 130 lb size, and who is probably less experienced than her and certainly not in her class when it comes to competition level. Faced up against her male counterpart though she'd literally be risking her life.
That dude looked a lot more than 130 lbs.
Sure. Lifting capacity in D&D gets skewed for the big numbers because it stop scaling linearly as it climbs. The jump between two adjacent strength scores on that table keeps getting bigger and bigger. So its not necessarily the best measurement especially where strength in D&D scale linearly elsewhere. To definitively prove my point, we'd have to come to some concensus as to what 'strength' meant and how this collective score could be measured. I doubt we can. I will note here that a +2 difference in strength in D20 is supposed to equate to about a 5% difference in outcome (as you yourself mention). So here are some numbers to chew on.
5% relative to the DC.
100 meter freestyle swim: Men's 44.94; Women's 52.07 (16.8% slower) - Upper body strength is the big winner here.
Assuming a base DC of 5, that's pretty close to your 10% for a +2. After accounting, again, for the much greater number of male competitive athletes.
100 meter dash: Men's, 9.58; Women's 10.49 (9.5% slower); At only about 10% slower, women do pretty good here as any boy who has chased girls on a playground could tell you. Size is of small consequence here. But note that while 10.49 is really fast, the world record probably wouldn't place you in the top three finishers at a state level High School meet for boys.
D&D doesn't relate Str to movement, and this probably has more to do with men's relatively long stride and compact pelvises.
High Jump: Men's 2.45 m; Women's 2.09 m (15% lower) - A lot of this is probably greater atheletic ability in tall men than in tall women, but this is almost all fast muscle power which is where men and women really get really separated. Mitigating that is the aforementioned closer leg strength of women to men.
This is a pretty strong one, if you assume D&D Str includes, to a degree, height.
Long Jump: Men's 8.95 m; Women's 7.52 m (16% shorter)
Real-life: again, longer stride. In D&D, this is a pretty good case for up to a +3 difference in Jump ratings.
Now if we really trusted the D&D skill system this would be what, a +4 or even +6 difference in strength on the basis of out come?
Whoa, there. Up to +6 difference in
skill. For Strength, you can't just take the biggest number. You have to pick something representative.
As far as punching goes, I've heard some numbers out there for female women in the 1000lbs of force range which let me tell you is enough to knock you flat. I don't want to take that to the face. The problem is that top male fighters are going to be generating something like 2800lbs of force.
There is no question men have a punching advantage.
It's just not even close once we get away from the lower range of male size. I don't even know how to equate those sorts of differences. In the real world and D&D terms, a lot of punching power is technique (Power Attack, anyone?), but I'm assuming her equal or even superior ability of the female to perform the technique. The upper body power differences are just enormous.
In D&D and real life, technique magnifies power differences. But again, just using punch strength is a cheap measure, because mechanically, men excel at punching.
Not in a punch they can't.
In a kick they can't in a punch?
The leg strength of women doesn't lag the upper body strength of men quite as much, so the kick strength is going to be similar but its still going to lag behind.
Lag, sure. Again, there are many fewer kickboxers. But it's not going to lag that much.
Well, that's hardly surprising. You'd expect that when a women competes in a male theater they are heavily self-selecting.
Much like adventurers.
Isn't that based highly on 'level', and not strength?
Assuming they are 4th level or below, Str is pretty significant.
I'm ok with that. I'm just annoyed by the few people (not necessarily you) that or either arguing that realisticly there is no physical difference that isn't a cultural construct anyway, and/or that if you think this sort of realism is ok it must mean you are sexist of some sort.
Who, exactly, is arguing that? Care to quote something out of this thread?
The whole rules system of most RPGs, indeed the whole set of fundamental assumptions about the sort of challenges you are going to be facing in RPGs are geared to male strengths.
What are "male" strengths? Most RPGs don't center around clean-and-jerks, throwing baseballs, or peeing standing up.
Rarely does your character have to finish a marathon in under a certain amount of time compared to how often he has to beat something up.
In fact, very rarely does a roleplaying game even reach the level of detail necessary to rate "world experts" in any field. You would have to go to a % system at minimum.
Rarely does the ability to rapidly memorize the contents of a list come up as often as hitting something with a stick, nor does sense motive or concentration (or as you said surviving a famine) play as large of a role as BAB. And the sorts of rules common in RPGs reflect these biases. Of course, those biases don't reflect the real world all that well either, as for most people 'beats people up good' would be an utterly useless superpower (but oddly or not it's the one most comic book readers care about). In my fantasy game I use simple but unrealistic positive modifiers to charisma and wisdom to offset lower strength (and its optional anyway). A more realistic system would break it down in to very complex circumstantial modifiers.
Possibly. Very few countries in my game world have mixed gender armies, but all of them have mixed gender clergy and arcane magic users are drawn almost equally from both sexes. Taxing females could be seen as enforcing and explaining these social and cultural roles.
Why would you enforce those roles in PCs? Do you also tax people who want to play thieves, social outsiders, or sorcerers? (or whatever passes for abnormal in your world; maybe those are common day jobs)
My primary goal is to simply defend the idea that a person could have that opinion without being a bad person, not to strike down as bad people who don't have a different stat packages for different genders.
I don't think people are
bad people for having different stats. I just think
1) they may be, knowingly or not, disparaging player interest in playing the kind of character they want to play
2) reflecting their own biases in exaggering or simplifying constructs into game terms
3) ignoring the fact that adventurers are self-selecting and do not reflect averages in any way
) have a 21 Strength.
