Corinth said:
The past was as it was for a reason, not all of which stemmed from some whacked-out dogma of woman-hating, and any setting with similiar physical conditions shall produce a similiar result.
I hope that you don't believe that I was trying to imply otherwise. And I also understand (and was aware of at the time of my previous post) your point about how important it can be for a given population to protect its women, from a reproductive standpoint.
I only meant that the default setting represented by the Core Rules is a far more equal society than our own medieval period and it seems largely implicit that it has been that way for a long period of time. I base this assumption on several facts supported by the Core Rules:
- Adventurers are fairly common.
- They are just as likely to be female as male.
- These people (the ones that survive anyway) will almost certainly come to be regarded as heroes or at least "personages of note" among the rest of the population, and therefore rolemodels.
Please don't misunderstand my point to mean that the game must or even should be played under these guidelines. I don't think that any given GM should feel constrained against having one, some or all of the societies in his world be one that pressures women away from dangerous roles. I don't even think he needs to come up with a good reason and I'll admit to having run my last campaign along those lines as well.
I only make the point that, in the absense of such designations for those societies, there is little reason for the male adventurers to regard females (and particularly female adventurers) as anything other than equals. "Equals" doesn't mean that they won't display any feminine traits, but I'd contend that their similarities will far outweigh any differences. And that's been a main theme of this thread anyway.
Just wanted to clarify my point a bit.
