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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5551637" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  The boys basketball team... well not so much.  People used to joke about how the our girls could probably beat our boys.  One day at gym late in the sesmester after the girls had one the state championship, the gym teacher had the girls team play the boys that were in the gym.  Mind you, not the boys team, the boys just in the gym class - many of us being far from atheletic and would rather been in study hall playing D&D.  Within only a few seconds it was clear it wasn't a remotely fair match.  By the end of it, it was clear that however much atheletic prowess and ball skill they had, they did't have remotely enough hand speed, foot speed, or height to compensate against guys who wouldn't have been picked first string in a pickup game.  It was kinda embarassing, and the gym teacher called it off.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.  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.(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.)  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.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?  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.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.100 meter freestyle swim: Men's 44.94; Women's 52.07 (16.8% slower) - Upper body strength is the big winner here.  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.  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.Long Jump: Men's 8.95 m; Women's 7.52 m (16% shorter)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?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.  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.Not in a punch they can't.  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.Well, that's hardly surprising.  You'd expect that when a women competes in a male theater they are heavily self-selecting.Isn't that based highly on 'level', and not strength?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.  Agreed.  I think in a 'realistic' game it would be difficult to quantify what those benefits where without going to levels of hyper-realism that most games don't bother with.  Reiterating what I said earlier, that isn't concidental.  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.  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.  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.  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.</blockquote>

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