So I just don't understand the logic here. Is Briene (from Game of Thrones) a completely unrealistic character?
Since you quoted me, I assume you are asking me. I can't explain "anti-Briene" logic, because I'm not anti-Briene.
So I just don't understand the logic here. Is Briene (from Game of Thrones) a completely unrealistic character?
Let's step it up a notch. What would it tell you if someone asked "What sort of Intelligence penalty rule should I implement for dark-skinned humans?" Would such a rule make the game more realistic? Certainly there are folks who feel it would, and there is even some "scientific" work that supports it. Would you applaud a game utilizing such a rule for its simulationism or verisimilitude? Could the author of such a game come here and say he wrote that for the sake of "realism"?
For me, I think it would tell me more about the author than the world.
Let's step it up a notch. What would it tell you if someone asked "What sort of Intelligence penalty rule should I implement for dark-skinned humans?" Would such a rule make the game more realistic? Certainly there are folks who feel it would, and there is even some "scientific" work that supports it. Would you applaud a game utilizing such a rule for its simulationism or verisimilitude? Could the author of such a game come here and say he wrote that for the sake of "realism"?
For me, I think it would tell me more about the author than the world.
Apples and oranges. There's all kinds of evidence for gender differences in strength and none as far as I know for racial differences in intelligence.
Ok, let's run with this.
What modifier should women have? How do you express this in a game, so that it is as realistic as possible?
Actually, that's not true. There is most certainly research for racial differences in intelligence. Some years ago a professor at University of Western Ontario made big ripples publishing just such a paper.
But, again, let's run with things. What modifier are we talking about here that preserves your sense of realism for men being stronger than women, but, allows for 2 foot tall, 30 pound halflings to be only 2 points weaker than a human.
I'll use 2E as it's the system I'm most familiar with. Based on my 2E Players Handbook, which lists deadlift capability by strength score, and cursory research of male and female deadlift capability from this site: http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards.html it looks like the difference ought to be about 3 points. I'd probably express this as a +3 bonus for men to a strength roll.
According to the site you linked to: "Keep in mind, the standards shown in the tables do not represent the highest level of strength performance possible." They are, as far as I can tell, standards of what deadlifters should be able to accomplish based on past results from a single weightlifting category (deadlift) from 1950 to the present....with no clear statement of where the data came from and whether they are representative. I find it a bit difficult to believe that, especially given cultural attitudes about female strength and weightlifting, that these are an accurate representations of potential STR scores in real-life humans that can be seamlessly ported to D&D.
But that aside, the issue is that we have a system that is unrealistic about human ability from the get-go, and so worrying that it accurately reflects maximum human STR potential by gender is....well, misplaced. We know why Dragonborn and gnomes only vary slightly from the human norms, despite that variance being wholly unrealistic: game balance. Given that, I find it very strange to bring a wargamer-like focus on realism between human males and females.
Look at the cover of the 4e DMG2. There are two people who dominate that scene - a man and a woman. They are descending a steep stone stairway cut into the side of a cliff; across the valley from them is a sinister-looking fortress of some kind. The woman is wearing a midriff top with a lot of cleavage displayed, and the artist has her posed with her back arched, so that her breasts project forward, further amplifying her cleavage.illustrations virtually never have any sort of unambiguous context to the scenes they depict (short us being told, or otherwise having it clearly indicated, that they're meant to represent a specific scene from a specific narrative). Given that, why not presume that, if the characters depicted are part of a larger world, how they're equipped is sufficient for a scenario that they're either heading for or returning from.
That is not really true. First, deontological morality categorises classes of action by their (typical) effects - for instance, killings are wrong because they (typically) resut in the radical undermining of some particular individual's interest in living his/her life. Kant explains the wrongness of lying by considering the consequences of a universalisation of acting on the principle that lying is permissible (namely, all rational communication would become impossible).deontological ethics hold that the morality of an action is determined by the action itself, and in no way by the results of that action