NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5551063" data-attributes="member: 4937">But, it is "muscle bound women warriors with 18 str" that is unreal and artificial.  For the purposes of "let's play pretend", I agree we can have female STR 22 melee brawlers, but for the purposes of this discussion lets not pretend that the lack of contraint is real and the constraint is artificial.Likewise let's not pretend that adhering to unreality of fantasy swordswomen is what gives us women in mail hauberks rather than chainmail bikinis.  It's the unreality of the muscle bound kick butt warrior that gives us and is tied to the "chain mail bikini".  Quite the contrary, it is going to be the game designer/master who insists on reality who is most going to oppose the "chainmail bikini".   I take this to the degree that my game doesn't even use the word "chainmail" nor "plate mail" or any other oxymoron.   Fantasyisms like "studded leather armor" don't appear on the equipment table.  The muscle bound women in the chain mail bikini is ultimately a male centric fantasy that is less about empowering women than it is about demystifying them for a bunch of introverted boyish nerds.  That it is also a fantasy that can be enjoyed by women is undoubted and unsurprising; afterall, I like bonnet dramas even though they are ultimely female centric fantasies.With that I agree.   The presence or absence of a female template (or male template) doesn't strike me as a thing of particularly great moment.  I personally don't care that much either way.   To the extent that I've been getting up on my soap box to denounce not having gender templating in a game, it's mostly because I don't like hearing this argument simplified down to "you're immoral to have gender templates" as if the argument was that clear cut and simple.  The whole 'realism' vs. 'unrealism' argument that seems to be the dominate mode of debate in this thread strikes me as a proxy argument, because ultimately I can't figure out why it would be worth having if it wasn't.  It's a simple fact that women have about 3/4's of the strength of men for a given body weight, and are only about 85% of male size.  This extends over the full range of human atheletic ability.   This is a far large difference in ability that is expressed by any of the D&D racial templates, so any talk about how it isn't realistic because men and women don't differ that much is bizarre.  Whatever really underlies the argument, it can't be the facts of human physical ability.</blockquote>

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