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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5555918" data-attributes="member: 4937">You mean like adventurers?  Welcome to the thread.  There is a whole bundle of things to unpack from your post, and I probably won't get to them all.First of all, I'd like to note that women's ability to live longer natural lives than men (barring death from childbirth) isn't something that a normal RPG invests much interest in.  The last time I read anything that really cared about this it was 1e D&D, and I've never really seen a campaign go long enough that it mattered.  Constitution is usually most obviously important for making one resistant to physical trauma, an area that is more usually related to size and cross sectional area of bones, and which really doesn't give one much ability to live a long healthy life.   In fact, the idea of giving women a Constitution bonus is interesting because there are many areas where it makes sense.  Women do tend to do better at pain tolerance, endurance, famine resistance, and longevity.   But the problem is that normally Constitution implicitly or explicitly bundles thoughs things together with being a big hefty beefcake as if they were secondary attributes of being stout.   In fact, they aren't and a scrawny looking women is more likely to excell at feats of endurance than a 300lb NFL linemen, even as the linemen is far less likely to suffer broken bones after a bone jarring hit.  So the basic problem here is that D&D - and practically every other RPG you can name - doesn't consider it important to distinguish between the two.  It's not realistic, and what it does is force you to play by rules and for goals where men excel.   There is a built in male bias to the game systems and what they concentrate on simulating - usually physical combat, usually melee combat at that.   Consider for example the details usually lavished on grappling.Because of this built in male bias, I to tend to avoid enforcing stat based differences between the genders.   My houserules don't do it.  The tools that might make it both interesting and realistic at the same time just aren't there.  And even though for much of my DMing career, most of my players were female, there just isn't a lot of demand for it.You suggestions that men should get Wisdom and Charisma penalties are also interesting.   They probably aren't strictly realistic, because Wisdom and Charisma also bundle together complicated things, but they do have some justification.  There is a reason that women tend end up as receptionists and spokes persons.  Both genders tend to prefer it and be more comfortable with it.  In my own game, to the extent that I do penalize men, it is exactly in this way that I penalize them.  The optional trait, "Fairer Sex", gives you a -4 penalty to STR and a +2 bonus on WIS and CHR.  It's not fully realistic, but its close enough and it is my opinion interesting.To a certain extent I do to.  However, I don't go as far as to suggest that "in general" constitutes a universal ban on the practice or that empasizing gender differences couldn't be interesting.   For one thing, deempasizing them doesn't strike me as being exactly the same thing as being respectful and comfortable with the opposite sex.  It strikes me more like the character in "Dorkness Rising" who is playing a female character but keeps forgetting he's female (except when he uses the character as a slut).  To the extent that I find people get annoyed when you bring up differences between the sexes, I often wonder whether there comfort depends on being willfully blind to the differences.  Actually, it puts another tool in the hands of optimizers.  Of course, it may mean that to play a particular optimal build you may have to play a character of a particular gender, but you are comfortable with that right?   I mean, I'm the DM, I have to do it all the time.I consider that a feature, and not a bug.In my experience, women tend to self-select out of any profession that requires them to be alone and involved in a lot of tedious emotionally unrewarding work.   So at least entertain the possibility that being a high level theoretical mathemetician favors among other things having a lower than normal wisdom, just because the quality of life you sacrifice for the joy of solving an equation is probably pretty high.I think you make this question rhetorically, but to me its actually the most interesting question you make, because I don't know the answer to it but looking at the question I think it probably has some very interesting answers.  I think your question ultimately comes down to, "What should roleplaying be about?"   The emphasis on stat minutia is not an emphasis on role playing, and suggests totally different motives and goals of play.</blockquote>

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