D&D 5E (2014) Should the next edition of D&D promote more equality?

[bogmad]

wait

 

[TanithT]

Example ran a deadlands game with a very close black friend of mine who played a former slave turned doctor, we talked about it and yes some npc's used the "N" word but it was made very clear that those were the bad guys and he said it made the victories against them all the more sweeter.

All of these are some good examples of solid potential plot hooks and settings that can offer a sense of gritty realism, obstacles for your heroes to overcome, well drawn evil villains, etc.

However, you're right that you'd definitely want to check in ahead with your players. Folks who have to fight a lot of not so fun battles of racism and sexism in the real world might not want to do it in their games, too.

I don't think anyone is arguing that it is wrong for you to bring these elements into your home game with everyone's comfort and consent, but the point under discussion is whether racism and sexism should actually be built into the core material. I would say no, it should not be.

 

[billd91]

I don't think anyone is arguing that it is wrong for you to bring these elements into your home game with everyone's comfort and consent, but the point under discussion is whether racism and sexism should actually be built into the core material. I would say no, it should not be.

It's a genre-based thing. I fully expect racial animosity in my D&D or Traveller - but between fictitious races - elves vs orcs, dwarves vs giants, goblins, and orcs, gnomes vs kobolds, doggies vs stinkers - that the game wants to provide color for (and they should provide at least some color for them). Racism between human ethnic groups, though, isn't really necessary.

That said, in a Call of Cthulhu game set in the 1920s/30s, if racism doesn't come up in some way, then the experience isn't very immersive. If I'm investigating the appearance of some dark young of Shub-Niggurath in rural Alabama and Jim Crow segregation doesn't come up in some way through the course of the campaign, then I'm going to start losing my ability to ground the character in the setting. But that's part of that particular game genre's (historical macabre horror) setting. And it can add a bit of immersive color and complications. It becomes a bigger deal for a bunch of white American investigators to head into the Blacktown area of Nairobi or even to a Harlem club or shop when incorporating some elements of racism, than if everyone is ethnic/color-blind.

 

[Libramarian]

Penalising the characters that half the player base identifies with?

Women aren't half the player base.

So, you've got no problem with a female fighter who can slay dragons a hundred times her size with her pinprick of a sword; who can leap off a 200-foot cliff and not only survive, not only bounce back to her feet and stride away, but do this reliably; who can singlehandedly tackle dozens of foes and emerge victorious; but you have a problem with her being able to lift as much weight as a man.

Yeah, okay. Whatever.

I'm not exactly sure of your reasoning here but it appears to be fallacious. The reason that characters of modest Strength in D&D can perform these amazing feats is because Strength has only a small influence on the resolution of these actions within the system. Are you similarly perturbed that a male character of 14 Strength can perform these feats despite not being able to lift as much weight as a male character of 18 Strength?

Gender based ability penalties just don't make any sense. You don't say all male barbarians have to be equal in strength; they can have any ability range they roll, or pick from a standard array, etc. and then justify why (age, genetics, etc) as they wish. Why penalize someone who wants to play an exceptional character just because of that person's gender?

It's a character limitation not a player limitation. You don't need to play a character of your own gender.

It's asinine, and possibly destructive, to tell someone "here's a made up world where anything is possible. Except a woman will never ever be able to be stronger than a man."

That's not the effect that gender-based ability score mods have.

trying to hard-code human sexual differences into an RPG is a fool's game, not only because there are so many of them, but also because those differences are statistical averages. Almost by definition, adventuring PCs are statistical outliers.

Differences in the average are more apparent at the extremes of a normal distribution, not less. If you randomly select a man and a woman, there's a significant chance that the woman will be stronger. But at the elite end, e.g. Olympic-level weightlifting, the chance that a woman will be stronger than a man is negligible. If anything the fact that player characters are exceptional supports gender-based mechanical differences.

...

I'm not in favor of gender-based ability score mods either, but bad arguments are bad arguments.

The reason I don't like them is because it's awkward and not a lot of fun to apply them during character creation in mixed groups. I think that's a good enough reason. We don't need to pretend reality is different from the way it is to justify a preference to not simulate one small part of it in a fantasy RPG.

 

[delericho]

- Removed -

I replied before I read Umbran's request of a few pages ago. This post, therefore, is inappropriate. Sorry.

 

[delericho]

People are way to sensitive about stuff in a fantasy game.
I would love to see a campaign world where the following existed:
> a few kingdoms females could not own land
> an amazonian society where men are only seen as slaves for labor or breeding
> a city with no orc blooded signs posted at the local taverns and stores
> a society that keeps halflings as house servents and sold on slave ships [they take up less space]
> where a church of a good religion persecutes those with alternate sexual preferences or identities
> a kingdom of elves that treat humans as slaves and considers them non people

ect....

I genuinely believe there is (or at least should be) a place for a "Mature Themes" setting that builds stuff like this in. I have no problems with the existence of such a setting, and might well buy it and use it. With the right group, in the right mood, that can be excellent.

However, for the core rules of the new edition of D&D (and, indeed, for the next versions of FR, Eberron, etc), I definitely think WotC should adopt what I call the "Battlestar Galactica" model, where we see plenty of examples of men and women in all sorts of roles, where characters are racially diverse, and where nobody ever asks "can a woman be a fighter pilot" because the answer is so obviously 'yes'. And if that means sacrificing a little versimilitude, then so be it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Differences in the average are more apparent at the extremes of a normal distribution, not less. If you randomly select a man and a woman, there's a significant chance that the woman will be stronger. But at the elite end, e.g. Olympic-level weightlifting, the chance that a woman will be stronger than a man is negligible. If anything the fact that player characters are exceptional supports gender-based mechanical differences.

...

I'm not in favor of gender-based ability score mods either, but bad arguments are bad arguments.

Statistically speaking, true...for the real world. But just like we don't have large, fire-breathing dragons in the skies over Boulder, Co, we don't have to slavishly follow the satistics of the RW for humans in a fantasy realm.

(Hell, D&D humans already have another characteristic RW humans don't have: the ability to successfully have viable offspring with creatures of extremely different species.)

Besides, ability mods in D&D do not apply only to the extremes of those outliers but to every member of a given species- they are part & parcel of the game's definition of "average". All Orcs considered together- male & female, hero & zero- are, on average +2 stronger than the world's statistical norm of most other species.

If we wanted to get realistic, we could include all kinds of stat modifiers: sex, social status, nutrition, genetics, Pre-adventuring career & training, lazy person vs driven, etc.

But like so many other things, D&D abstracts things greatly, and gives a single main stat modifier based on race and another based on age, and leaves it at that. Arbitrary? Sure. Other games DO include some of those factors. But most of them don't have the same level of abstraction as D&D.

Furthermore, if we do add the Str mod for men, we have to do other gender-based modifiers that favor females. Do we really want gender modifiers that make men less accurate shooters or less pain tolerant just so we can have them be stronger than women? And how would we do some of those?

"Pain Tolerance" sounds like something Con based. But Con also controls things like endurance & resistance to fatigue. Accuracy is a Dex based thing, but playing a stringed instrument like a guitar also requires "dexterity"...and male players dominate the list of "fastest guitar players" in the world.

Introducing gender based stat mods in the interests of statistical accuracy would be, as I stated, a fools game. D&D stats are too abstracted for something like that to work.

 

[jonesy]

Women aren't half the player base.

They are half the potential player base. You might never reach the full potential, but that's no reason to alienate those who are interested in your product.

 

[Umbran]

Women aren't half the player base.

14 years ago, they were measured by survey to be about 20% of the player base. Do you expect that to have decreased? If not, then they are still sizable enough to not wish to alienate. The specific number may not stand well, but the concept certainly does.

It's a character limitation not a player limitation. You don't need to play a character of your own gender.

That's one of those "technically true, but will still get you slapped at a party" arguments. It displays a stunning lack of sensitivity to the issues at hand. I believe other discussions on these boards have shown that while cross-gender play is possible, most of us don't want to play that way. Given a strong desire to play same-gender, such restrictions then do become player-restrictions.

That's not the effect that gender-based ability score mods have.

In terms of maximum ability, it does.

But at the elite end, e.g. Olympic-level weightlifting, the chance that a woman will be stronger than a man is negligible. If anything the fact that player characters are exceptional supports gender-based mechanical differences.

If you must - the chance that an Olympic-level weightlifter will be able to effectively wield a sword and not die in combat is also negligible. Unless you want to also enforce the results of such extreme over-training in the game (by say, limiting the Dex of high-Str characters) then this argument falls apart.

 

[billd91]

It's a character limitation not a player limitation. You don't need to play a character of your own gender.

Now, that's a bad argument in this debate. Making female players play across gender just to get the same mechanical advantage of the male players playing their own?