Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5565133" data-attributes="member: 4937">Let me say to start with that to a large extent I agree with you.  If you are going to head along the route of realism, then you are going to compute the natural encumbrance of the creature/character (that is how encumbered the creature is by its own body) based on its size and apply encumbrance modifiers on the basis of whether it has positive or negative encumbrance.  You are then going to have some sort of table relating strength to body weight so that you can't cheat by picking a weight that is unnaturally low for the muscle mass indicated by your strength score and your weight is going to be a major mechanical attribute and not merely a fluff descriptor of your character's appearance.Once you get to that basis where size really matters, you've covered a very large percentage of the difference between men and women.   Men, on average and at the extremes, are bigger and being bigger can carry more muscle mass and can use their mass as a weapon.  In this way BRP is more realistic than D&D because it includes size as an attribute and uses it to compute things like hit points and melee damage.Unfortunately, if what you are intending is both a realistic system and minimal difference between the genders, this only gets you about half way.  The problem is that, especially in the upper body, men are also pound for pound stronger than women.   So you still won't end up with a system that favors women being melee brutes and be remotely realistic.There is a saying that "God made man but Sam Colt made him equal."  This applies regardless of gender.   In the real world, women don't want to fight men in a boxing ring and its the rare woman who could defeat a atheletic male fighter in a melee.   But if someone told me there was a 14 year old girl out there with a semi-automatic .22 LR, an empty 20 oz. soda bottle, a x10 scope, and a death wish you'd better believe I'd have the cold sweats.  Being dangerous doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to throw a punch.  It takes only about 1 lb of force to stick a sharp knife into someone, and 10 lbs will run you through.  Even a child can do it.</blockquote>

Verification