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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5556495" data-attributes="member: 54877">Reach is a minor consideration, and is primarily handled via strength in the legs, speed and correctness of movement, and so forth. Only three major things matter in fencing--speed, technique, and timing. Everything else is secondary. Wits matter far more than reach, even being secondary. Heck, attitude and psychology matter far more than reach.  I suspect that reach matters a lot more, relatively, in real melee combat, but I can't say how much. But then in real combat, you won't bring a long knife to a halberd fight. If they let me have a spear on the fencing strip, I think I could reverse that 15-4 decision where I lost to a B fencer in one of my better performances. But then, maybe not, since he was in the air force. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> There are probably more male fencers than female fencers. I'm not sure, since I let my USFA subscription lapse last year. It gets closer every year. But good fencers? I doubt there is much of a gap in numbers. Anyway, fencers are an odd bunch, anyway. The self-selection factors for the sport are numerous. It isn't called "high speed chess with a blade" for nothing.  1. To the extent that Dex measures muscle development in D&D (and I agree, it probably does to a great extent), then yes. 2. Sex differences in fencing are definitely less than real world combat. There are numerous reason why, but a big one is that you only need to exert a tiny amount of pressure on a tip to get a touch. Most fencing touches wouldn't even count as a "hit" in D&D, and a lot of the dirty tricks that you could readily do using strength are prohibited by rule. This is why I tell my daughter that if she is ever in a position where she must defend herself and cannot run, the first thing she should do is break every "red card" and "black card" option that occurs to her. Even at her age, she could really hurt someone doing that. She isn't much bigger than a halfling, and without the chimpanzee body type. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> 3. "Higher level fencer" could be taken several ways. But taking the way I think you mean it ... If you put 32 male "A-fencers" in a tournament with 32 female "A-fencers", the males will do better. The chances that a female will win the whole thing is very slight. I wouldn't take 100-1 odds on it, unless I had some inside information on one of the females.  But this is misleading. The guys got their "A" ratings competing mostly against other guys. The ladies, against ladies. The ladies who place the highest in that tournament will beat several of the guys (and probably frequently enter mixed tournaments for the practice, so that they can beat the women.) Guys don't have this option to practice against such groups. So the "A" ratings don't mean exactly the same thing.  D&D Strength enters into this because of the middle position I've been taking--or rather, that is precisely where it doesn't enter into it. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/angel.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":angel:" title="Angel    :angel:" data-shortname=":angel:" /> My position is that there are real-world differences to men and women in regard to physical capabilities, fencing being an example of which I'm very conversant and find relevant, but that D&D has no business modeling these, as the system does not take into account the things that matter when considering real-world gender physical differences.  Generally speaking, women are much easier to train in fencing, and learn more rapidly. Child birth can be a set back, of course, as with anything that takes a lot of "time off", but fencing is relatively forgiving of such, once you come back. All of fencing is unnatural, and thus difficult to do correctly, but once you learn it, you don't really forget. Teenage boys have a terrible time because their body development tends to occur later, and right at the time they are starting to get it. So they start to learn, grow a lot, get all uncoordinated and incapable of doing any physical movement correctly, and then have to learn again with effectively new bodies. A girl that grew rapidly at age 14 or 15 would have the same problem. You can't fence when you can't even walk to the strip without tripping over your own feet. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Once this is straightened out, however, males rapidly enter their peak fencing period, where they are in a race to develop considerable skill before the physical peak is crested. Females have some of the same dynamics, but their changes lead to a slower but steadier development. It is not uncommon for the 20-40 age bracket to be contested by women on the upper end of the range. (And true of any age bracket, really.) With men, it doesn't work that way. A 35 year old male fencer is fighting the good fight, and developing skills to enjoy the 41-60 bracket. It is all relative, of course. The owner of the school, now in his 70s, was a lad in New Jersey, learning to fence in the Italian schools common in NJ at the time. There was this old guy with a bad hip and slow as Christmas who used to make all the cocky teenage boys cry. He couldn't even lunge, but if you can put the blade where you need to, moving it a tiny fraction where they can't hit you, it doesn't matter.  Sufficient skill differences trumps everything. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

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