jgbrowning said:
1. All we're saying is that when you define fantasy as sexist, you're going to have NPCs that reflect that attitude. YOU however are the one chosing to define fantasy as sexist. Its your call, your the DM. No one else is making you play DnD like Gor or Conan.
This nonsense has got to stop.
The last couple of pages have been full of women's rights crusaders arguing the point, ignoring reality and using the disappointingly absurd PHB definition of men and women (two distinct genders which are in all ways identical except for appearance (Ember notwithstanding)) to support their ridiculous statements.
The "genderless" world of the PHB might be fun to game in, if your campaign consists of treehugging social utopias wherein
Adventurers' Guilds send unisex groups of politically correct, enlightened young men and women into dungeons (which exist for no logical reason other than to provide housing for monsters - must be another assumed D&D social reform) for the express purpose of killing the inhabitants and stealing their belongings. I assume that in this world, men aren't the men that we of real-world Earth are familiar with. Neither are women anything remotely resembling the mothers, sisters and, in some rare instances, wives and girlfriends that we interact with IRL (or even are - mythago et al). And might I point out that the vast majority, if not all, of the non-human living creatures in the real world that organise themselves socially, do so on the basis of distinct gender roles, one way or the other. Also, I can't remember ever hearing the term "dominant female", though that could, admittedly, be due to the patriarchal society I live in. (And we won't get into why, after X million years of evolution, the dominant animal on the planet is still largely patriarchal.)
However, if the societal makeup of your setting is in any way important to your campaign, and you decide to model your societies on the only real-world societal evidence we have, (ie.: societies driven by the dynamic facilitated by differing gender roles), then the members of those societies will need to be modelled after real-life humans.
Which means that they will need to:
a) have hormones. These are what cause our brains to favour different methods of dealing with unfulfilled needs (whether physiological, safety, social, esteem or self-actualisation needs).
b) reproduce sexually. As opposed to the unisexual, Barbie-and-Ken style plastic genital mound humans of the PHB.
Such real-life humans (and any fantasy races modelled after them) will react emotionally, as well as logically in any given situation.
Not only that, but in the dangerous, low-technology (compared to d20 Modern) world of the typical D&D campaign, people will die with alarming (to our modern sensibilities) frequency. Even given access to healing magic, life in such a setting will tend to be extremely cheap, and in fact, this life-is-cheap mentality is a staple of the dark and gritty sub-genre so many of us like to play in.
Of course YMMV and you might game in a setting featuring an enlightened society where people never (or rarely) suffer from violence, and disease and starvation are unheard of. Good for you - several authors with far more imagination than I, have made their fortunes translating their vision of such a utopia to print.
However, since such a society has never existed, I personally feel limited in my choice of research material, and therefore avoid such societies in my campaign.
And if you're reading this, I suspect you do too. No, I don't want to hear from people who
do game in such a setting - I'm sure you exist, and I'm sure you have fun and I'm sure you wish you could have paid for only
25% of the PHB because that's about how much of it you would use in such a setting.
Therefore, in the violent world of a typical D&D campaign, people will die with distressing regularity. Related to this is the fact that the dominance of a people is often solely determined by their numbers. (And technology being low, less time will be able to be devoted to cerebral pursuits such as education and philosophy, and thus such blights as racism will be rampant - there will be precious little successful multiculturalism in such a world, and therefore cultures
will strive to become dominant, should they be in a position to be able to doinate.)
This will place extreme importance on the ability to procreate. Now it's a given that a community of 10 men and 100 women will be able to generate offspring much faster than a community of 10 women and 100 men.
Therefore, in such a brutal setting, the importance of women with the ability to bear healthy children will be paramount. Not only that, but a year of her
not being pregnant will be considered a wasted year, especially factoring in high infant mortality in such a world. So while it's barbaric and oppressive to our modern way of thinking, it's a simple matter of survival to state that a woman in her prime is far more valuable to her comunity being constantly pregnant and caring for infants than engaging in activities (beside childbirth) that could get her killed. Such as combat.
This mindset will lead to a woman's life being considered far more valuable than a man's life, and so their place in society will be very clearly-defined and safe.
Patriarchal oppression doesn't really come into it. Because individualism only becomes important with safety (eg. the importance every military organisation places on conformity), people will be defined by their usefulness to the community and how efficiently they fulfill that role.
Therefore, a healthy woman of childbearing age risking her life will be simply
abhorrent to the majority of people living in a dangerous world.
