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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2052337" data-attributes="member: 27012">In D&D 3.5 terms (and in some suggested conversions from AD&D exceptional strength to D&D 3E), the male maximum (based on clean and jerk overhead lift records compared to the Heavy Load top end) is in the 23 (263.5kg) range while the female maximum is around 20 (183.5kg) (just barely over, actually).  In D&D 3.5 terms, men should be from 2 to 4 points stronger than women at the average and maximum (based not only on olympic records but military studies on strength), which is fairly substantial in game terms.  Strength is a function of size, body fat percentages, hormones, and a few other issues that favor men with respect to strength to a significant degree.The key argument against strength limits or adjustments for female characters isn't really realism but fun and fairness, which is a big element in this thread.  A sound realism argument can be made for strength limits or adjustments but there are quite legitimate reasons why people, both male and female, don't think they are fun.  In a game where mechanics (and combat mechanics in particular) can define how powerful and effective a character is, a sex-based penalty on strength, for example, becames a sex-based penalty on combat effectiveness and power.  That understandably bothers many people who don't want their choice of character sex to become an opportunity for min-maxing.  Given the large numbers of women warriors in genre fiction, such limits also really aren't necessarily from a genre perspective.  It's possible in D&D 3.5, however, that moving any limited points or adjusted points from STR to DEX (e.g., -2 STR/+2 DEX) and the use of the Weapon Finesse feat could do a decent job of emulating many of the women warriors in the fantasy genre if someone really had to have strength adjustments in their game for "realism" purposes.  Any penalty like that should be offset for balance just as penalties for being a certain race are, something many early role-playing games written by males, for males, didn't bother to do.  Original AD&D didn't really offer suitable compensation for the limits so it was simply a disadvantage to be female and it's not difficult to understand why that's seen as sexist.  In many ways, the poor way that AD&D and other early RPGs handled such attribute differences has pretty much associated the whole idea of sex differentiated attributes as sexism.  It wasn't unusual to in many early gaming magazines to find articles (often written by women) praising Traveller for not doing penalizing female characters.  Of course a simple but realistic approach is to just change the way character height and weight is calculated and not worry about sex-based modifiers at all.  Strength is largely a function of muscle mass and corresponds reasonably well to lean weight.  This is why they put boxers and wrestlers into weight classes.  The idea is to create a formula that converts STR into a weight for each race and then based on build (e.g., lean, average, heavy) convert the weight into a height.  That way, you could have your 20+ Strength woman and she'd simply be unusually (by real world standards) but realistically large.The size difference reflected in the D&D height and weight charts (Human males start at 4' 10" and 120lbs. while Human females start at 4' 5" and 85lbs.) reflect a big part of why there are strength differences between men and women in the real world -- men are bigger and bigger people can be stronger.  Eliminate that dimorphism in your fantasy setting and you've eliminated much of the cause of strength differences in the real world.  I've seen Lucy Lawless (aka Xena) in real life and there really isn't anything wrong with unusually tall women warriors. Of course there are also plenty of reasons why one could argue that it's absurd to even worry about realism when it comes to a game like D&D.  That's why I agree that fun is the bottom line with issues like this.</blockquote>

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