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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5561511" data-attributes="member: 15538">Let's look at the half-feat bonus thing. Say, males get Athletic, or +1 bonus on top of athletic. If you want Athletic + a different trait, males have a lower opportunity costIf you want Athletic + whatever trait females can snag, males and females are equivalentIf you don't want Athletic, males have a higher opportunity costIf you want to be an especially athletic male, you pay the same cost for a lower relative benefit of any other character choosing a feat, but it's the only game in town (you pay more for the peaches)So what's the end result:If you want to play an athletic character who also does Y, you would prefer a male. Unless you also want to do X (female bonus trait), in which case it's a wash.If you want to play a maximally athletic character, you play a male. Except almost no one plays maximally athletic characters, since it's disproportionately expensive for the benefit.This leads to the result that most athletic characters are male, but female characters who are athletic are no less athletic than the vast majority of athletic characters. A few outlier males surpass them.Are you satisfied with this result? It both discourages female characters and gives them a lower maximum potential compared to male characters, while at the same time not actually representing a real mathematical difference in the majority of affected characters. But it does it to a small degree. The cost is exacted against some characters not not others. The opportunity cost for females is quite high; rather than Athletic, wouldn't most fighters prefer to simply snag another combat feat?If you want to run a game where women are "differently able" then I think you have found your solution. Only determined players will attempt to make a female character who is the physical equivalent to a man. Only sufficiently determined players will create male characters who are physically superior to those determined players, but they can do so. My feeling is that, socially and psychologically, this reinforces the "no girls allowed" meme that female players probably already experience. I'd probably prefer to simply assign a half-strength bonus, just +1 to Climb and Swim, for instance. Now females still have a lower maximum, as before, but they don't pay a special price for choosing to be more athletic (and they are more athletic than non-athletic males) and males aren't penalized if they want to be especially athletic.Simply giving men and women a bonus feat, chosen from a list, is also a fairly soft approach, so long as each list has some actually good options in it. There really is no getting around the question of whether you want there to be a hard cap difference or not, or an opportunity cost to playing a gender-transgressive concept or not.</blockquote>

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