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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 5559687" data-attributes="member: 8863">The old 1e rules were probably an attempt to try to model some realism onto the original game.  Not just reflecting the overall average strength of women compared to men, but also an attempt to model the pseudo-medieval world the D&D rules were usually crammed into.  In such a society, men are mostly going to be warriors or laborers.  The warriors are going to be trained from childhood to build strength since it's very important in pre-modern warfare, while a male laborer is probably going to be doing a lot of physical tasks that will build strength.  I'm not sure if it was meant to be consciously sexist, but we're also dealing with 1e ideas of balance, which we've noted here before were somewhat different than the more modern rules.  And also, I wouldn't even bother trying to keep D&D strictly medieval since I've long since come to the conclusion that medieval fits poorly, so it doesn't neceesarily need to conform to medieval gender roles.If we're talking about adding some sort of penalty to something like 3e rules, then you need a bonus somewhere to balance things out.  This is discussed in the DMG under racial adjustments.  Strength has a big impact on game balance, so if you're going to penalize it you need to give and equal bonus to either Dex or Con to compensate.  Downside is that like El Mahdi said, Dex and Con are a bit more generalized than Str, it's harder to measure them in real world tems.  You can't balance it as well by penalizing Int, Wis, or Cha because then you need 2 or all three to compensate, and as someone who's always been the intellectual nerd rather than the dumb jock, I'd find that insulting.I also agree with him that a cap hurts a little less than a penality, since the cap only comes into play if you roll high enough to hit it, or if it limits point buy.  The Str 12 cap mentioned earlier in the thread was pretty damn asinine and simply unreasonable (not to mention unrealistic, I'm sure plenty of medieval women hit at least the equivalent of 13 simply from various labors), though OTOH, El Mahdi's cap of 21 is kind of academic because it's beyond the normal human range anyway, so why bother.  The penalty always hits though whether you roll 10 or 18, you're still down points.  Then again in 3e, you've got ability increases.  That messes up things with a cap, unless the cap is so high that you're not going to reach it.  And again with penalties, even though you are increasing the score, you still have less points.In the end, I think D&D tends to be so generalized that it's just not worth trying to model the differences between men and women (which are more than just gross anatomical difference), especially when some people will find it insulting no matter how much you try to balance it or make it fair or whatever.  It's also so general that there's no single default for cultural gender norms.  And it's fantasy, so realism is moot.  It just adds too many problems to the game with arguments and assumptions about my views, and no real benefits to balance that I wouldn't bother. The only system I can think of that might have enough detail to model the differences is F.A.T.A.L., and we all know how badly wrong that is in any number of ways.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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