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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5551711" data-attributes="member: 15538">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.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.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.Which by that measure, would women a higher Con. However, it seems unlikely women have more hit points. If they were countries, the men's soccer league would the USA, and the women's soccer league would be Jamaica. Can you take her? You want to arm wrestle her? That dude looked a lot more than 130 lbs.5% relative to the DC.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. D&D doesn't relate Str to movement, and this probably has more to do with men's relatively long stride and compact pelvises.This is a pretty strong one, if you assume D&D Str includes, to a degree, height. Real-life: again, longer stride. In D&D, this is a pretty good case for up to a +3 difference in Jump ratings.Whoa, there. Up to +6 difference in skill. For Strength, you can't just take the biggest number. You have to pick something representative. There is no question men have a punching advantage.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.In a kick they can't in a punch?Lag, sure. Again, there are many fewer kickboxers. But it's not going to lag that much. Much like adventurers.Assuming they are 4th level or below, Str is pretty significant.Who, exactly, is arguing that? Care to quote something out of this thread?What are "male" strengths? Most RPGs don't center around clean-and-jerks, throwing baseballs, or peeing standing 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.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)I don't think people are bad people for having different stats. I just think1) they may be, knowingly or not, disparaging player interest in playing the kind of character they want to play2) reflecting their own biases in exaggering or simplifying constructs into game terms3) ignoring the fact that adventurers are self-selecting and do not reflect averages in any way</blockquote>

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