Why am I not allowed to have stat modifiers for gender in my games? Bethesda games do it, Bioware games do it...

Its not bait, Im entirely serious

>Fundamentally, it's not about sexism. It's about enabling players being able to play the characters that they want to play, without penalizing them for a character choice.
Ive heard this argument but its kinda shit, if this were true why do we have racial stats? Ever notice that you dont see a lot of half orc wizards?

And yeah, the stat change is extremely subtle, so why is there such an issue with it?

If I have a girl with 15 str at chargen is 14 that much weaker? She's still stronger than the wizard sitting there with 8 str. This by no means makes it impossible for women to be stronger than men.

Nigger, nobody gives a shit if you do this. The only people you have to explain yourself to are the people you play with, and if they don't care, then nobody cares. The only reason to have this thread is to bait out an argument. Everyone here is well aware of that.

>And yeah, the stat change is extremely subtle, so why is there such an issue with it?

Your stat change is all enablement. You would be better off as just granting men +1 STR/CON and women +1 DEX/CHA, The penalties do nothing, and so should be removed: conservation of detail and all that.

> if this were true why do we have racial stats?

Race (as defined in D&D) is far more profound than gender. A male human and a female human are still going to approach the world and view it in basically the same way, but any human and any orc are going to have fundamentally different viewpoints and thought processes.

Further, note that in modern D&D, race *does* only give bonuses, not penalties. The singular exception thus far are races with Sunlight Sensitivity (like drow).

However, fundamentally the point is this: it's just sexist. Why? Because it is. It's been accepted by modern society as being fundamentally sexist. This isn't even a SJW thing because it was a choice that was arrived at decades ago, well before SJW started its modern kicking and screaming.

And, of course, there's the fact that D&D is not and has never tried to be a real life simulator.

Acknowledging reality, in the form of sexual dimorphism, is sexist? Get the fuck out.

>wanting realism in your fantasy RPG
your stats do nothing anyway, why have them?

I don't have any actual orcs or wizards at my game table. Its about player accordance. Unless sexual differences are a focus of my game or campaign, I gain absolutely nothing by including them and alienate potential players. I would much rather use the complexity on something that actually matters for the game.

>I just want a game that better reflects reality

Why? If you want reality go outside. People don't play RPGs because they want to reenact reality, they play them because they want to pretend to be a wizard or a barbarian or a street samurai. In RPGs realism is not an end in and of itself, it's only a means to the end of creating a world that the players can intuitively grasp and immerse themselves in. RPGs are by their very nature abstractions, no matter how sophisticated a game of pretend can't accurately model the real world and it shouldn't have to. Most of the time it is necessary to ignore what is realistic because reality is often unbelievable and usually makes for poor game mechanics. What matters is verisimilitude, internal consistency, and suspension of disbelief, not realism.

>I just want a game that better reflects reality, and in reality
... and in reality...
>However, fundamentally the point is this: it's just sexist. Why? Because it is. It's been accepted by modern society as being fundamentally sexist. This isn't even a SJW thing because it was a choice that was arrived at decades ago

So there you go, it reflects reality very well.

btw, don't check the image, it may be too real.

>is sexist?
Giving maluses for it is sexist. It's like, even, textbook sexism.

Step one:
Be the GM

Step Two:
Enforce Rules

Step Three:
Probably Lose the group.

Simple.

Basically, what I'm saying is, you can have all these rules. No-one will kill you for either enforcing houserules as a GM or suggesting them as a player.
It's just that no-one HAS to play with your rules, and if they're shit, which they are, they may very well just abandon ship.

Why the fuck did you link this?

Simple: roleplaying games are about wish-fulfillment. Most of the customers are male and so they are geared towards letting men play out their fantasies of heroism. However, a part of the player-base is female. And they want their wish-fulfillment to.

PCs do all kinds of heroic stunt that are not very realistic - just to satisfy the player's desires and dreams. In that context, stretching the truth and making females just as strong to enable female gamers to live out their dreams is just fine.

Oh, look, it's another 'I need an optimized build' D&D retard. Kys.

See my post about wish fulfillment. If there were fantasy races in the real world playing RPGs, we'd tone down racial modifiers too.

Well, the classic is -4 STR. And that would be significant.

Well, he's asking why it's not being done commercially.

>However, fundamentally the point is this: it's just sexist. Why? Because it is. It's been accepted by modern society as being fundamentally sexist.
And we should never challenge past agreements, I see. Retard.

Well, that's okay with me. I mean you have HEMAfags rooting for RoS/SoS after all.

If accurately describing reality is sexist, your idea of sexism has to die with a sword in its foul black heart.

>If accurately describing reality is sexist
>malus to con for women
>describing reality
kek

Nice strawman. I didn't say anything about CON. But since you raise the topic: if women are about 10% smaller, sticking the same piece of metal into a man or a woman will produce about 10% larger wounds for females, relative to body size.

Anyway, RPGs clearly do not accurately model the differences between sexes in real life.

fuck your subversive genderism in tabletop games.

This was once a bastion of tranquiltiy and peace and now goons like you fuck this over aswell as if there were no other problem in the world like FUCKING GENDER.

Because the only reason you want them is to stir up crap.

What if i'm playing an already freak woman with more physical strength and stamina than even the most burly men? I'm now unable to out-strength a male character that rolled 18 even though I did too.He has 19, and a +4, I have 17 and a +3.

The Mountain is still stronger than Brienne.

Because then you're still going to get a bunch of male fighters dumping cha and female sorcerers and rogues dumping strength.

The difference between default/gender isn't much. The difference between male/female would be more noticeable.
M/F
Str 16/14
Dex 13/15
Con 14/12
Cha 7/9

>I just want a game that better reflects reality

Yep. The sole reason is to stir up shit.

The Mountain is nearly 8 feet in the book. Brienne is just an extraordinarily tall woman. Not a good comparison whatsoever.

>not allowed
Who's stopping you?
Stop being an underconfident sissy beta cuck.
If you want something in your games? Put it in your fucking games.
Disregard the disapproval of the normies. Disregard the haters. Disregard Veeky Forums not liking what you like. Disregard peer acceptance.
You want it? Into the game it goes.

I don't know why you are not allowed to do that, OP. I run gender based stat modifiers in my game just fine. My argument for it was that it makes gender selection interesting.

There's no reason not to do it in your own campaign. I mean, there are stat modifiers for race.

The strongest male is still stronger than the strongest female. Very good comparison.

If you really want to have sexual dimorphism, do it through cap adjustment rather than a bonus/malus.

Level 1 males can have a max of 20 STR and 18 DEX, while level 1 females can have a max of 18 STR and 20 DEX.

Average teenage males are stronger than olympic level female athletes.

Why not doing it ? It's up to you and your players only.

Don't get pissed if you get backlash tho.

This. Female PCs should not be generally weaker than male PCs. It's just that females with an upper body strength rivaling the Mountain become too much of a stretch.

Source on that? I find it hard to believe that a mediocre male is stronger than the strongest female.

The short of it is:

a) For a large enough body of players, stat modifiers for gender are probably going to hamper their fun. If someone wants to play a Strong Woman, it's not going to be fun for them if the game's strongest female character can't reach the cool peaks of strength the game offers. Likewise for people who want to play Suave Man.

a.1) On the larger scale, what sex-based modifiers communicates to women who try to enter the tabletop RPG community is that they're different, considered inferior, and/or regarded in terms of female stereotypes. So on the industry level, having sex-based modifiers in the game creates an immediately hostile environment for women, which is counter to the whole "have fun"-bit of sitting around a table with friends and pretending to be elves and dwarves. Maybe not all women experience it this way, but enough women have this experience to consider it a systematic problem of the community.

b) Strength 18 is an abstract measure. For men, it represents, say, the 99.7th percentile. For women, it represents the 99.99999th percentile. Since they both represent the same in-game capacity, why bother assigning a modifier to it?

c) In a lot of systems modifiers that balance out are pointless because you can always just put more points into your weak spots and sell your advantages to get the points you need.

d) Even if your quest for gender-based realism in games isn't sexist, your idea of what this realism *is* is based on stereotypes and antiquated ideas about gender roles, or in other words sexist as fuck. +1 DEX +1 CHA? Women are in general more flexible and have higher manual dexterity than men, yet men are generally faster and more agile. These differences are pretty subtle, and not well-suited for quantifying with a flat modifier.

The +1 cha doesn't work if you're gay/lesbian.
Real life is a lot more complicated than stats.

Does it? It now means that is I want to be fantasy fighter, I'll be male. How interesting is that?

That's because that is the biggest B/S bait ever.

Oh, please. There is no PC boogeyman invading your games. As difficult as the concept may be for you to accept, the writers behind D&D - of their own volition - have simply decided that character gender should not have any bearing on a character's ability scores.

>We all know that theres a huge difference between men and women

No there isn't. Men and women have physical disparities on *average*, but women can and sometimes do possess physical advantages over men. How many Veeky Forumsers are manlets? How many can be overpowered by Isis the Amazon?

The reason these disparities are generally ignored in roleplaying is because there are sometimes exceptions to them. Why establish hard-coded biological rules that prevent these exceptions from ever occurring? Are you telling me that roleplaying a seven-foot Amazon queen is absolutely forbidden? Such a character may be a rare phenomenon, but she's nonetheless a legitimate product of nature.

>Why am I not allowed to have stat modifiers for gender in my games?

I'm pretty sure rulebooks explicitly state that any and every rule can be blatantly ignored at the GM's discretion.

Well OP, I know you don't actually play RPGs because you don't have any friends and you're just desperate to receive validation on Veeky Forums, but we're good at pretending on this board.

Pretend that the girl with 18 Strength would actually have a Strength of 22 if she was a guy.

>realism is sexist
LOL, the denial is strong in this one. Men and and women not competing against each other at the Olympics is also incredibly sexist, I take it? I'm sure of it but guess what? Mother Nature discriminates.

Well, it's interesting that you're an optimum build cancer douchebag.

>Are you telling me that roleplaying a seven-foot Amazon queen is absolutely forbidden?
Ofc not. But she's probably still not as strong as Gregor Clegane. And if a woman needs to play a female PC as strong as him, I have to question her if she isn't stretching belief a bit much. Suspense of disbelief and all that jazz?

>I can shoot fireball and challenge the gods
>But hell no, I cannot be stronger than a character in a mediocre pop fantasy show

>a setting features magic & monsters
>this gives me carte blanche to pull all kinds of shit my imagination can conceive
This meme needs to die.

>it doesn't
Do you even play TRPGs?

What is this, bitching for ants?

Just because there are dragons and magic in a setting, that doesn't mean that humans are fundamentally different from in the real world. Do you see my point? Not all spoons HAVE to be magical spoons. Not everything is a fucking +1 imagination item. Sometimes something is just mundane, a copy of the real-world. Like a piece of bread, a stalk of grass, a glass of milk.

Note that bethesda does in the system that has a 0-100 range of attributes and the difference is never more than 5-10 points.

V. Different from a 0-20 system where the difference was minimum of 4 points (which works out to 20 points in an 100 point system

Because we use point buy, not random generation. Random generation would require gender modifiers, not a system built to make balanced heroes. You're a hero, not a representative sample of your gender/race/species

>Why am I not allowed
You are. It is legal. No one is putting a gun to your head. If you're the GM, you make the rules.
But players are also allowed to walk away.

I'm going to summarize some of the most common arguments I see in bait thread like this, in the hope that people will invent new arguments. I'll arrange them in order of perceived frequency

>1. It's muh fantasy game, not realism
>2. Sexism/SJW ruined muh game
>3. It's muh hero character, not peasant
>4. Depends on the setting

Men have a higher degree of spatial awareness, but our increased bone and muscle structure in our arms limits fine dexterity, so Dex would have to be split to represent this.

That's true but likewise it doesn't mean that things always have to adhere to real world norms unless otherwise noted, it is fantasy after all. If magic exists why not have the gap between genders reduced or removed if you want to? Just because not all spoons have to be magical spoons doesn't mean there aren't any magical spoons at all out there.

>And we should never challenge past agreements

Sure, you can try, but the issue is that you're challenging past agreements with the exact same arguments that were made in the past. And people back then, despite those arguments, decided that implementing modifiers based on gender for races like humans is sexist, because when it comes to worlds of HIGH ADVENTURE and when talking about player characters, the differences a) aren't meaningful enough and b) inhibit otherwise valid character options for the sake of enforcing "reality" in games where we explicitly don't want the real world to intrude anymore than it has to in order to maintain a coherent game experience.

Should gravity be presumed to work the same? Yes, because screwing with that enough to be noticeable would fundamentally change a LOT in the game world and really mess with a number of baseline assumptions about how things like objects in flight or base height and weight work.

But should the differences between men and women work the same? No. Because removing those differences has no impact whatsoever on the gaming experience.

>if women are about 10% smaller, sticking the same piece of metal into a man or a woman will produce about 10% larger wounds for females, relative to body size.

Hit points do not necessarily represent actual physical wounds. Sometimes they do: falling from a tall building and taking fall damage. But often they don't: your character isn't literally shot full of a dozen arrows when s/he is facing an archer and can't reach them.

Is that a bad thing? Gender roles have existed from time immemorial, you know.

>your character isn't literally shot full of a dozen arrows when s/he is facing an archer and can't reach them.

And yet, on-hit effects like poison trigger on each hit, regardless of your hit point total. So clearly, you are wrong, and the character is, in fact, hit bu every arrow that "hit".

Well, I guess it does. If you're 14.

>what is genre emulation?

>implementing modifiers based on gender for races like humans is sexist
So sexism is a meaningless term? Good to know.
>Hit points do not necessarily represent actual physical wounds.
Nice switch. We were talking about CON. But then again you're bringing about another weak spot of D&D: inseperably mixing HPs derived from toughness with those derived from divine favor.

>gender roles
>not gender rolls

Do you see the problem intrinsic to what you're saying?

Like I said, it varies. In 5E it even explicitly states, on page 196 of the PHB, that "Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck."

>We were talking about CON

No, we're talking about hit points, as long as you're mentioning things like wounds. If you wanted to talk about CON, you'd discuss something like endurance or resistance to disease (which for most classes in 5E is just a straight-up CON check).

This is pretty much the only right answer. It's an issue of group desire than anything else. Are your group members fine with this sort of thing? Then go for it. Are they not? Then don't. Simple as that.

>Like I said, it varies.
So what you're saying is that poisoned arrows are somehow more accurate than non-poisoned ones?

I'm saying that if you want to imagine your character as being stuck full of arrows, that's fine.

If you want to imagine your character having a ton of near-misses, the poison from which can be explained as dramatic scratches from said near misses, that's fine too.

But in either case since hit points are intentionally abstract, using the difference between the physical durability of men and women in real life is silly, since hit points do not always represent physical durability.

>what is genre emulation?
When a game has mechanics specifically built to capture and emulate the feel of a certain genre? At least that's what I found when I googled it.

I don't really see how that helps your point, real life is not a genre. If anything since games like DnD are trying to emulate heroic fantasy, where great heroes with abilities far beyond normal men go on huge adventures and do impossible deeds, then it would make sense to penalize the player as little as possible for his character choices. In heroic fantasy the main characters are far beyond the norm, so the PCs should be too. If I'm trying to design a game where you play as Conan the Barbarian why would I penalize the player if they want to play as Red Sonja or Xena, Warrior Princess instead?

>since hit points do not always represent physical durability.

Moreover they also include luck in DnD 5e; are women inherently less lucky than men?

> If I'm trying to design a game where you play as Conan the Barbarian why would I penalize the player if they want to play as Red Sonja or Xena, Warrior Princess instead?

Or for that matter Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, of whom the narrative of "Red Nails" establishes as someone even Conan would be wary of fighting (not that he'd necessarily lose, per se, just that his victory is no certain thing - it's the only time in all of Howard's Conan stories where we see Conan as unsure of his ability to take someone in a straight-up brawl) and his near-equal in swordplay.

>are women inherently less lucky than men?

They were born into the sex that has to bleed out of the crotch every month for most of their lives, and occasionally push human beings through a small opening in their groin.

Take a guess.

No, there is no problem.

Just like there is no problem with expecting dwarves to be fighters instead of sorcerers, there is no problem with having men be likewise, or women be expected to be sorcerers and rogues instead of fighters. Gender-based modifiers are not different from racial modifiers, and serve the same purpose.

>They were born into the sex that has to bleed out of the crotch every month for most of their lives

Actually menstrual cycle's intensity and regularity is largely determined by body fat, of which a warrior woman likely has little as compared to the average woman. Valeria of the Red Brotherhood might not menstruate all that regularly, and when she does the bleeding is only slight.

>and occasionally push human beings through a small opening in their groin.

Well, at the other end of the spectrum, there is literally not enough blood in the average man's body to both maintain an erection and run the brain at 100% capacity at the same time - and erections are largely involuntary. Plus testosterone is a Hell of a drug that can drive people to do stupid shit for no real reason at all.

I hate to burst your bubble, but you, as a male, aren't as strong as you think you are. Yes, you could beat up a member of a your own species who is naturally weaker than you, but in a realistic fantasy world, there would be no martial heroes. Humans aren't actually that fast, or strong

If you took a human versus an orc or even a half-orc (given how most Tabletop rpgs depict them), the human should lose almost every time.

If you married an orc woman and an anonymous call about spousal abuse came through, the likely stereotype wouldn't be that you were beating her.

Yes, in realistic terms human women are weaker than men, but in realistic terms you couldn't play a hero anyway. In the real world war heroes rescue a few of their friends and don't die, or get really lucky with their rolls and manage to kill more enemies than they logically should.
They get a medal and someday they get to go home. They get to home, and then get to spend the rest of their lives remembering the ones who didn't.

In a realistic fantasy setting an adventurer isn't the rich man in a wonderful fortress, he's that grizzled old man with half a face burned off, his fingers half gone, arthritis wracking his body, and a lifetime full of dead companions stuffed in his brain. He spent his time creeping through dank ruins to find a single chest of treasure, and every time some thread surprised them another one died. One good wound in a far out place and you're dead, traveling back to a priest is likely to take days. They found treasure, but the old man can only do so much as a commoner. He moved to the city, abs stored his gold well, but still he is getting old, and trying to stop thuefs is getting hard, and trying to remember what a con is is getting hard as well. His mind is leaving him as well as his body.

An adventurer's life would suck if it were realistic. Humans are fragile. Yes, even men.
Also this.

>You get bonuses for your gender, but no penalty or restriction apart from what you can do growing up.
But that's wrong. Renown and Honor requirements for a female character to be recognized as a ruler are almost a full third higher, odds of receiving a fief as a vassal are reduced, persuasion odds with nobles are lower, and quest offers are weighted towards less rewarding tasks. Sexism in M&B is pervasive and comprehensive.

I believe the other user meant physically, specifically in the character gen. Social effects of sexism are of course comprehensive, and one of the reasons my ex-gf loved the game (for what it's worth she was far better at getting fiefs than I was, but that might be because of how much effort it took).

As an addendum to the whole menstrual cycle thing, that's probably only a human thing anyway, the specific result of how we evolved. It's doubtful that dwarves, elves, or others even have them.

OPEN THE FLOODGATES

>Why am I not allowed to have stat modifiers for gender in my games?
You are. The game just doesn't bother telling you to do it because it's your own business and the idea means jack shit for most. Or if you're going point-buy, then just stat your character out in the way you imagine sexual dimorphism works. Nobody has an obligation to include something as silly as gender-based stat modifiers in the system.

That might have just been the choice of Lord affecting grants, since they each have a different rate. If you join the Nords, for example, it doesn't matter how much you do, Ragnar's going to keep just about everything for himself.

unless there is a physical force stoping you from doing it, than no one, it's just stupid, that's all

D&D HP are an inseperable mix of toughness and luck. Yeah, it's not a great system.

I mean if you're doing stats based on gender shouldn't it be more like

>men
+4str
+2con
+2cha
+1int
+2dex

>women
+1wis

If you're looking for realism

I mean, you're allowed to. Just make sure your group's okay with that.

you really need to try harder with your bait

You gotta work on your b8 m8.

Not bait men simply are better at these things.

The best world leaders, the best athletes, the most intelligent philosophers, artists and writers.

If you can point out an area women are better at than men I'd like to hear it. Just look to history

They're certainly better at not paying attention to you than we are.

>best world leaders
Most of the time the "best" were best because leading the world was a mans job, at the moment a women is leading europe and she is doing quait well (let's put the whole trolling aside, we are still the richest and most advanced continent in the world, enjoying the highest standard of living and one of the highest standards of education, second only in the university department to america, and thats only because the fucks steal all our scientists). Also Catherine the great, Margaret thacher, Elizabeth the first to name a few
>writers,philosophers,artists
All for a very long time considered "man's jobs", and it was so because women could not get the right education. Today women tend to dominate in biology and chemistry
>Just look to history
History show that a group of people with little to no accses to education tend to be behind a group who has accses to education
>the best athletes
This one is true, and will be true because of biology

I respect you for replying seriously even if I disagree with you. It can be difficult to get a serious reply to an opinion like that, even on the Internet.

There are a number of studies indicating women have superior immune systems, higher tolerance for stress (both physical and mental), are better multitaskers, and the clear point that 85% of centenarians are female and that on average a female's lifespan exceeds our own by ten years. Some research into education is beginning to indicate females are excelling in the educational system beyond male peers, receiving college degrees faster and more regularly, and that the long running tie in IQ and other standardized cognition tests is beginning to sway in the favor of females.

Essentially we're physically stronger, better at single-task focus and larger. These have enabled previous generations to dominate female populations but as our world grows ever less reliant on big fuckers who can do one thing really well and moreso on smart fuckers who can do twenty things well at once, we're losing out in the long run until selection starts favoring smarter men, which we've seen starting as recently as the mid 1980s.

But if it doesn't adhere to the real world, it is magical okay? You are not listening at all. You are just restating the same shit. If magic exists, so what? If magic exists: nothing. Either it adheres to the real world, or it does not exist and is therefore fiction. If it is fiction, it might as well be magical, it is a pointless distinction for me to make at this point anyway, because you seem to think that if magic exists is some sort of logical predicate which gives the conclusion you want.

I think what you dont get about the whole argument of "you can blast a dragon with a fire ball argument" thing is that the world is allredy very unrealistic and having a "gender gap" for the sake of realism is as retarded as beaing angry that the swords are not made corectly, its fucking magic, a wizard magicked the gender gap away because he could, here is your explanation

Funnily enough, all of these penalties (and the game even mentions it's like a harder mode) don't matter as playing as a female makes the game a ton easier.

After all, you can just woo a lord, marry him, and have a strong-ass guy who will follow you whenever you ask and will also defect to help build your own kingdom

History is written by the victors. It's easy to falsify any information you want with "historical evidence."

Female isn't a race

Don't bother. He's an idiot and a troll.

And there it is again, jesus christ.
Do you not see the irrationality of your claim? Even if it is possible to blast dragons with fire that absolutely does nothing to imply anything else but that exact statement. Why? Because it is fiction, it is magic. NO, a wizard did not do it, unless the setting state they did it. If someone wants something for realism that is not retarded, that is their wish. People use realism in fantasy all the FUCKING time. In fact, I would fucking argue, that the use of realism is almost fucking neccessary, because it is the jarring discrepancy between what is real and what is fiction that makes fiction stand out because we LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD.