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

[Paraxis]

First I don't think there needs to be any rules for size or gender to effect ability scores, I am very happy that 4e did away with ability score penalties based on race.

But would an optional rule presented in the main book stating that females receive a -2 Str, but gain a +2 con,dex,wis, or cha be acceptable. To be honest the smartest person I know is my sister in-law so was very tempted to add int to the list as well. But women's pain threshold has been documented higher than mens, they usually make better ballet dancers and gymnasts, are more intuitive and almost always have better social graces so the other stat modifiers are pretty easy to see.

I then see a lot of min/max male players making female wizards, clerics, rogues, ect... So honestly I would not use the rule but wondering how the people wanting females to get a penalty feel about it.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think D&D is doing a (fairly) good job at promoting equality of men and women. There are no discrimination of sorts in the rules, and men and women characters are "roughly" equally featured both in the text and the artwork (with the exception of the chainmail bikini sacred cow, of course).

I'm not sure how much I think a game like D&D can actually do to promote equality of any sort. However, I don't think things like gender-biased ability scores or whatever actually add anything worthwhile to the game. I would like to see the chainmail bikinis et al. DIAF. However, my objections there are more with things which are senseless or counterintuitive like chainmail bikinis, inadequate adventuring gear, giant-size weapons on normal-sized characters, etc. If you're gonna portray a female adventurer, she should look like she actually has some clue about the business. (Unless, I suppose, its a cartoonish illustration, but we don't seem to get very many of those anymore.)

But how about characters of different ethnicity? I don't know in 4e books, but in 3e books there were occasionally some asian-looking characters, but there were almost no black human characters. Notice that I'm not talking about necessarily having black dwarves, elves and halflings, but why not humans?

Gods of wind and sky, yes! I would love to see D&D get a lot more "generic" or better yet universal in its fantasy...or perhaps stop equating "Generic" with "pseudo-European". I'd love to see more depictions of adventures or adventurers inspired by other cultures. Even better if its a culture that the writers make up wholesale. I'd also like to encourage more diversity in the other PC races that isn't just black-dwarves, oriental-dwarves, amerindian-dwarves, etc. get creative a bit.

How about gender-bending characters? Can we have some occasional man NPC with man consort, or woman NPC with woman consort in the game (just presented as such, with no attached comment)? Or is the topic still too sensitive?

That's a tougher one. For me, its a non-issue (although the same caveats apply as above). However, I know there are places and people who are so homophobic that any such depictions would put D&D squarely back into the "satanism" box (if it ever left it.) That may not be something WotC is likely to want. Although honestly, I'm not sure how much the task of illustrating D&D lends itself to portraying enough of a character's sexuality to be visible. An image that does so runs the risk of a basically shouting THIS IS OUR GAY ARISTOCRAT PICTURE! LOOK HOW DIVERSE WE ARE!

What's your take?

I hope at this point that young people are no longer looking to their rpg material for porn-like reasons. (We invented the internet specifically to make the distribution of porn more efficient, didn't we? Or does it just seem that way?) Personally, I'd like to dial back the art in a lot of ways, maybe see more simple line-art and less of the brilliantly-colored in-your-face action-quasi-realism. In keeping with that, I'd like depictions of adventurers to look like they could actually survive a kobold encounter.

 

[Ichneumon]

You can safely assume that Wizards will keep a rule like that far away from anything they publish, leaving it solely to DMs to pitch it to their groups if they dare.

 

[ArmoredSaint]

But women's pain threshold has been documented higher than mens...

Just to throw fuel on the fire...

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/26934.php

 

[Hussar]

Again, I have to ask, how do you justify a -2 STR penalty for a halfling and a -2 STR penalty for a female human? The halfling is half the size of the human woman and about a quarter the mass. What does that STR penalty actually measure?

Or take an elf. According to Wikipedia, elves are "averaging between 4½ to 5½ feet and 95 to 135 pounds." That's still considerably smaller than a large woman. Yet, elves don't have a STR penalty.

When you start down this rabbit hole, it's very quickly apparent that it will never, ever end.

 

[jonesy]

Player characters are not statistical avarages. Not unless that's what the player decides to play, but then he'll just end up lagging behind the rest of the party. And the statistical avarages of our world should not dictate the avarages of a fantasy world. I'm not even sure statistical avarages are that relevant, and I really don't get the whole 'men are stronger on avarage therefore women need to get penalized' thing when your character spent his last adventure sword fighting a dragon.

 

[Umbran]

What does that STR penalty actually measure?
....
When you start down this rabbit hole, it's very quickly apparent that it will never, ever end.

Agreed. There is the simple idea that, whatever you feel the differences between genders in the real world are, D&D's levels of abstraction and granularity mean that those differences are functionally too small to appear in the stats, as compared to the differences between other races. The differences between human genders is smaller than, say, the differences between humans and halflings, or humans and half-orcs.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

First I don't think there needs to be any rules for size or gender to effect ability scores, I am very happy that 4e did away with ability score penalties based on race.

But would an optional rule presented in the main book stating that females receive a -2 Str, but gain a +2 con,dex,wis, or cha be acceptable. To be honest the smartest person I know is my sister in-law so was very tempted to add int to the list as well. But women's pain threshold has been documented higher than mens, they usually make better ballet dancers and gymnasts, are more intuitive and almost always have better social graces so the other stat modifiers are pretty easy to see.

I'm pretty sure I've read the opposite, that men actually resist pain better, based on newer studies. Probably based on caveman behavior (only men went hunting, I guess) which isn't remotely relevant in the 21st century. But even if that's the case, women tend to be healthier, which would be represented by ... high Con. I'm not even talking about attitude, but also genetics. (Two X chromosomes are more diverse than one.)

Suppose you were to "realistically" quantify Strength differences between men and women. Women generally have less upper body strength than men, which would "realistically" impact her ability to fight in hand-to-hand combat. But any female warrior probably had to train harder in order to impress her likely male trainers. Her Strength penalty to hit and damage could be exactly countered by her "badass" bonus to hit and damage. All that would be left would be her ability to lift stuff... and female bodybuilders do exist, and I don't think they should require a special feat.

There's no point of quantifying every difference between men and women. Those differences are too small for a coarse-grained D&D ruleset. And even if you managed to find a valid large difference, you're going to offend someone, probably half the gamers or even all of them!

(Not to mention the crazy mess that would occur if someone used shapechanging magic to temporarily change their gender! Or for longer term, if they're a doppelganger.)

Oddly enough, a female gamer I know agreed that female PCs should have lower Strength. Seriously. I was stunned for a few seconds. (The woman in question was pretty athletic herself, and could probably break me over her knee with little effort.) But I told her if she felt that way, she could simply assign a female PC lower Strength (through point buy or picking a lower die roll). Game rules aren't needed.

If a DM felt really strongly about that, they could have female NPC rogues or skirmishers be more common than female brute barbarian NPCs. Or something. But that's got nothing to do with how a person might play a female PC. Even if Brienne of Tarth is an uncommon archetype, you don't need the rules to "enforce" that. You'll just offend someone that way.

 

[Alzrius]

I want to make it clear that the following is my playing devil's advocate, and is in no way representative of my personal opinions on the subject. I simply enjoy the debate.

I would like to see the chainmail bikinis et al. DIAF. However, my objections there are more with things which are senseless or counterintuitive like chainmail bikinis, inadequate adventuring gear, giant-size weapons on normal-sized characters, etc. If you're gonna portray a female adventurer, she should look like she actually has some clue about the business.

Just out of curiosity, how would this go for characters that have game-based reasons for "counterintuitive" things? Paizo's Seoni is a good example of a character that looks like a sex object (high Charisma, being a sorcerer) and doesn't wear armor (due to no proficiency with armor, and arcane spell failure chances).

(I know there's a lot of dislike for the idea that Charisma has anything to do with physical attractiveness, but it is in there as part of what the ability score represents. Not the sum total, certainly, or even the majority, but the connection between the two is pretty well ingrained).

There is the simple idea that, whatever you feel the differences between genders in the real world are, D&D's levels of abstraction and granularity mean that those differences are functionally too small to appear in the stats, as compared to the differences between other races. The differences between human genders is smaller than, say, the differences between humans and halflings, or humans and half-orcs.

As I recall, First Edition's way of handling this wasn't to institute sex-based penalties, but rather sex-based caps on the maximum Strength score. If such a limit was set, would that fit with the level of granularity that the game depicts (if the limit was set high enough)?

For example, presuming we kept the usual range of ability scores, if there was a limit that said that men were capped at a Strength of 25, and women were capped at a Strength of 24, would that be a small enough differential that it would be a more appropriate representation?

 

[Umbran]

For example, presuming we kept the usual range of ability scores, if there was a limit that said that men were capped at a Strength of 25, and women were capped at a Strength of 24, would that be a small enough differential that it would be a more appropriate representation?

For your own game, you get to decide, of course.

For the game published by WotC... I'd have to call that silly, to be honest. It would be going out of their way to insert a fiddly-bit difference. What, really, does the game gain from that, and what is it likely to lose?