Is this offensive?

[Felix]

using a very specific

Whole body exercise.

artificial task

Much like arguing on the internet.

generally performed under ideal conditions

Producing a level playing field for both men and women.

by people the farthest thing from the norm as the basis for generalization.

Which will strip the alleged cultural bias from the results by polling only people who attempt to make themselves as strong as possible.

But seriously: "artificial task"? Employing a machine to measure wattage output; making it possible to compare power levels while removing the randomizing factor of water, wind, and shell conditions; making it possible to isolate the strength of a rower's stroke as distinct from their technique; this is artificial?

...Maybe you had a bad experience with a rower? I wouldn't feel bad about it, lots of people have.

 

[Felix]

Umbran,

I suppose I've seen a preponderance of evidence that suggests to me that men and women have different capabilities, physically and otherwise; combine that with a habit of engaging in argument and you'll get what I hope wasn't too abrasive a post.

At the very least we can agree that regardless its grounding in reality or not, gender modifiers are bad game design; if not for their own faults, then for the disruption they would cause at the gaming table by people opposed to the idea, their opinions being grounded in reality or not.

 

[pawsplay]

I think a more realistic comparison for men and women in D&D terms would be to make them climb a wall, jump a few hurdles, fight with a three pound training weapon, and haul sandbags. My prediction is that, for a group of physically active participants, men will meaningfully outperform women only in the sandbag event.

Rowing is a bad example for a number of reasons. First, it involves a very specific motion, not dynamic and varied actions. Str in D&D is very general. Second, yes, it involves only athletes. I don't know a lot about rowing, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess men are more commonly interested in rowing, giving them a huge advantage in the talent pool department. If there are three times as many male rowers as female, the top fifty percent of men are going to blow away the ten ten percent of women. Third, it's hard to translate rowing performance into D&D units. I don't know how much damage rowing causes or how many pounds it weighs. Telling me the energy output by itself is pretty meaningless, because Str in D&D does not measure energy output except in a very aggregate and general way. It's useful information, but certainly not the last word. Fourth, rowing is very demanding and places unusual demands on its participants; competitive rowers are going to have very different characteristics from average people, and that difference itself is going to be different than the differences between practitioners of one sport and another.

Finally, glancing at actual Olympic records, I see that the best times arevery close. I don't know what a double scull is, but I do know that 6.11.49 and 6.49.00 are close enough I question whether there's a difference AT ALL at the leve of detail D&D uses. A difference of just 8% or so, assuming rowing uses a similar progress to encumbrance, translates into a single point of Str.

So even if we use rowing as our test of strength, a cursory look suggests what has already been stated: while significant, the differences between men and women aren't MEANINGFUL. The exceptions are upper body lifting and throwing (advantage men) and gymnastics (advantage women). Even though women completely dominate gymnastics in terms of what they can physically do, I would never give women +2 Dex on the basis of that, simply because Dex represents more than just your Tumble modifier. While some people are resistant to the notion, Str in D&D is far more than horsepower, far more even though work output for a group of muscles or the body as a whole.

In specific areas, very specific tasks, you might be able to demonstrate a 1-2 point ability score difference between men and women. If you aggregate a number of performances, the difference essentially disappears.

 

[Sol.Dragonheart]

It's not just rowing. In practically any athletic competition which involves the use of strength, the best male athletes, and in many cases, the college level athletes out perform the best of the women. There is a reason virtually every professional sport has different leagues for each gender. Men are physically stronger than women, that's just a fact. Why facts should bother anyone is quite honestly beyond me.

In any case, however, why is this even being debated? The question should really be whether or not applying modifiers to the genders can enhance the game, and better flesh out the world from a simulationist standpoint. Not whether or not Humans in our world have such differences. Really, Humans are just as fantastic and unrealistic in the way they are presented in the D&D world as any other race, so there's no real practical or logical reason to attempt to model the humanity of Earth simply because of the name.

 

[S'mon]

While it doesn't offend me, I recommend making sex mods *optional*, otherwise female warrior PCs are sub-optimal. In my C&C game I do the following:

Normal human female max STR is 16, if you want your PC's higher, give a good reason in her background (Orc blood? Divine blessing?).

Female PCs may *optionally* take -2 STR & +1 CHA.

 

[S'mon]

In the real world, though, the only real differences between races are cosmetic ones

There are lots of major non-cosmetic differences between real-world population groups, which is why eg Kenyans dominate the long-distance running records and West Africans the 100m sprint. Those population groups don't necessarily coincide with popular American notions of human races though, although there's some overlap.

 

[S'mon]

similarly, any stat modifiers offend me.

3d6 in order or don't even bother.

I tend to agree; B/X and BECMI D&D have no mods, just minima for certain races. This avoids all the game balance problems of stat mods. Generally speaking I think maxima and minima for different races and sexes, all within the 3-18 range, is a better system than plus-this and minus-that.

 

[S'mon]

Edit: Just noticed that you did mention applying the other penalty to males instead. Kudos for that. All too often I see this discussion popping up as what modifiers to give female characters and leaving males for some bizarre reason as the norm.

For me the norm is an 18 year old human male fighter type - that's who typically does the fighting and adventuring in the real world and most fantasy worlds. If your world is different then you should norm off whatever is more typical.

 

[S'mon]

If I may inject another angle on the "realism" inherent in the lack of difference between gender in game stats, I would represent that the ability scores are generally not broken down to the point where such modifiers would be meaningful anyway.

For example if we assume that women are better at picking up languages but men are better at spacial awareness then those are both a sort of intelligence. Since there is only one stat for Intelligence in the game, one that isn't broken down by linguistics and spacial awareness, then there probably shouldn't be a gender difference.

Furthermore, while there have been real-world studies looking at male-female differences in intelligence (an old friend of my parents is a distinguished scholar in this field), if there is any difference in IQ, it appears to be at most 3-5 IQ points (either way, depending on population group), depending on how the IQ test is weighted, and this is below the granularity of the D&D stat system, ie in D&D terms human sexes are functionally identical in mean INT. Female variation is less though IRL - fewer 3s and 18s.

 

[S'mon]

Why the plus in charisma?

That's where I smell the sexism.

All the evidence is that women on average have superior personal interaction skills. I've been on police patrol and seen male and female officers dealing with suspects and seen this first hand, the women were much better at calming the suspects.