So Veeky Forums, what do you do to make your genders different in your pen and paper games?
Personally I like to shuffle stats a little.
Aarakocra, Dragonborn, Kobolds, and Lizardmen males get +2 Dex, -1 Str, -1 Con while females get +1 Con, -1 Dex to signify the females being slightly bigger.
Aasimar, Genasi, Human, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling males get +1 Str, +1 Con, -2 Wis, while females get +1 Dex, +1 Wis, -2 Str to show both the size difference and the general societal difference between the Human genders.
Dwarf, Elf, and Goliath males and females I leave equal.
Gnome males gain +2 Int, -2 Wis, females +2 Wis, -1 Con, -1 Str... Men make the devices, females fix the men after.
Minotaur males get +2 Str, +1 Con, -2 Int, -1 Wis and females have no stat alteration, the bulls are just bigger.
Orc males take +1 Str, +1 Con, females take +2 Wis because the males are the rampaging warriors and females lead the home-life.
But yeah, I am curious how other folks handle this kind of stuff.
Gender Differences in Pen and Paper
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Sheet, forgot the drawbacks on Orcs. Males are +1 Str, +1 Con, -1 Wis, -1 Int, females are +2 Wis, -1 Str, -1 Con.
>Hi, I keep making petty little stat changes for literally no purpose, point or gain except that I can.
Well, no, it is more a matter of helping things make sense. I know, madness to try and impose logic on a word of magic.
Orcs are raiders, pillagers, logically their females don't go on those or they die too. Steppe Nomads did not take their women to war, Orcs don't take their women to wargh.
The bounds of both the physical and societal roles that the genders take help shape them, so no, it is not to /literally no purpose/.
PCs: No change. They are exceptional individuals in any case.
Exceptional NPCs: see PCs.
Random NPCs: Depends on the setting.
So I assume you also alter stats accounting for occupations, day to day activities and variations along the bell curve also?
When that bandit gang attacks the party I can only assume that Boss Malone is +1Str and +1Con to account for the larger cut of the loot and thus better food and lifestyle over the rest while 'Fatty' the Chef is +1 Con because he eats more, tasting his own food and all but is -2 Str because he eats more and so is fat.
'No Ears' Greg is at -2 Per on account of his no ears. Lost them in a fight he did.
'Baby' McGee is a bit punch-drunk these days at -1 Per and -1 Dex. Took a few to many to the ole' noggin.
Don't forget in town that the blacksmith has a low fire immunity because he stands in front of one all day, he certainly needs to have that distinction about him.
Also Guard #1 likes to help his Mason father in his time off giving him +1 Str while Guard #2 chases after the Bakers Daughter affording him +2 Dex but that fooling around has left him at -2 Str.
Goblin Bork likes hunting and torturing rats so he has +1 Per and Dex while Grub likes watching, so there's +1 Wisdom.
Come on. I'm sure you'll have a blast with all this book keeping. It omly makes sense after all.
You're being silly to try and say that what I am doing as a default character generation alteration is silly.
Sorry my attempt to improve what my players encounter upsets you so.
Do you at least have better than a slippery slope strawman to go with?
The only effect this has on the game is that players start min-maxing gender in addition to everything else. Fuck realism.
Not a P&P game, but I just checked my "random NPC generator" code, and while most races aren't finalised yet, I have the values for elf women:
Agility +4, Dexterity +8, Size -5, Strength -5, Speed +7, Toughness -3, Creativity -3, Focus -5, Intuition -1, Linguistic Ability -5, Musicality +3, Patience +2, Social Awareness +3, Willpower +5, Alertness +1, Empathy +2, Hearing -3, Smelling -2, Vision +2, Morality -5.
For comparison: The values are on a 1-100 scale (though can go above 100 in some cases) and the base elf racial changes ones go from +15 (Attractiveness, Charisma, Refinement, Hearing, Vision) to -20 (Empathy, Morality) and -25 (Libido).
While you are an ass, I think you raise a valuable point.
Stat differences should come from obvious genetic dimorphism, not "women usually tend to sit around the fire and watch things!" sort of weak social stuff. That can justify things like proficiencies, but not big enough for a +2. Maaaaybe a +1.
>improve
It's literally pointless book keeping for litereraly no purpose but pointless book keeping.
What is it with DnD that draws raging assburgers to it like nothing else in this hobby? You never get someone complaining about the lack of gender adjustments in Savage Worlds, or that men should start with a dot in strenth in WoD or even in fucking Traveller. It's just DnD where retards screech for stat adjustments because muh verisimilitude and all three of those games are range way higher on the "realism" scale than a game about killing dragons in dungeons. What is it that draws the autists in?
larger sample size, and the ideas of gygaxian naturalism and 3rd edition's attempt to quantify everything
>>Hi, I keep making shitty bait threads for literally no purpose, point or gain except that I can.
Fix your post I did
In my setting men have +1 Penis and 1D4-1 Mammary size.
Women have no Penis stat but 1D6+1 Mammary size.
Transpeople get called cheating minmaxers and are booted from the group.
Trading your innate stat bonus for a poor quality version of the opposite sex's bonus doesn't sound much like min-maxing to me.
I make a checklist of some mandatory, some optional traits that players then build from. Gnolls would look something like
>Average ST of 13, females trend higher, males trend lower
>All gnolls have claws that qualify as either Sharp or Blunt
>All gnolls have Sharp Teeth
>All gnolls have Fur and DR 1, many females and some males have DR2
This way players know what to expect and where the racial norm is, and have an easier time knowing in what way their PC is exceptional or differ from the norm.
Honestly, at the point that any individual is at the level of a PC they're already above average in most stats. By level 5, you're pretty much superhuman. It's not that much of a stretch to assume superhuman females, so there's really no point in separate stats.
That logic implies there's no point in racial templates, because a superhuman lvl 5 orc, human and elf aren't that big of a stretch.
you are not wrong, all racial stat mods do is make certain class choices more or less optimal
So your men can have c cups?
Why bother with this shit? Just because women with 18 strength are one in a billion and men are one in a million means nothing in a fantasy game. They're unlikely to be common but so are 18s in any category. But PCs are supposed to be outliers anyhow. They are supposed to be heroes.
You could just make average women in your games have 9 Str and men 11 or 12 instead. Putting the genetic difference between genders into a standard stat boosts makes no sense. A man sitting on the couch his whole life will be roughly the same strength as a woman doing the same thing, or so close it doesn't matter. While training for men can yield much, much higher strength than women there are rare cases where women can be as strong as most trained men, just they can't be stronger or even as strong as the strongest men.
But again, fantasy game. Who cares if a female character has a 20 Str and can carry the entire party on her shoulders?
Females get -4 Str, males get -4 Con. If you don't like it, don't argue for "realism" in a pen and paper game.
Underrated post.
I wonder how many people here have actually given that game a spin.
The game itself is shit, shit, shit.
Playing it, or trying to, is a fucking blast.
I'm ... literally not talking about any specific game. It's a small (heh) generic random NPC generator I'm coding. Right now it's doing mostly what I want it to do in terms of family generation and the genetics of racial mixing (so you can be 50% human, 25% elf, 25% dwarf, and have some orcish racial traits from that one great-great-grandpa and it matters) and now I'm defining what that means for a set of (some 40) attributes.
You are stepping in dangerous territory.
It looks quite a lot like FATAL.
>Who cares if a female character has a 20 Str and can carry the entire party on her shoulders?
OP does, and he made this thread to advertise the fact. It is extremely important to him, most likely because he's used to comforting himself over his status as a weak human male with the knowledge that *at least he's stronger than the average woman*. So fragile is his sense of self-worth that the idea of strong human females in his games offends him. He therefore drags his frankly embarrassing obsession with the relative strength of the genders into his game. Nevertheless, he's aware deep in his soul that something is amiss with his obsession, and so he comes to Veeky Forums for emotional reinforcement, for all the other flabby fedoras to pat him on the back and agree that he's "only being rational" and suchlike.
That or he's trolling. It's highly likely, though, that the paragraph above applies in full, and he just *tells himself he's trolling* in order to get over his cognitive dissonance and actually click the Post button.
The attribute list is mostly from Dwarf Fortress.
They can in real life, so why not?
Woman have base value set 10, man have value set 11, base mod is still +0 for both but with the same effort a female can reach 11 a man can instead reach 12(+1).
There.
>waaaah abloo bloo mean man sayin muh stronk grrl waifu not real qq
Guard 2 could do nothing but chase the Baker's Daughter all day long and he'd still be much stronger than any typical woman.
And yes altering stats to reflect more unique characters is a good thing. Of course the gang boss should have higher stats.
And yes I'd expect a morbidly obese chef to have certain penalties. If he didn't after being described as 'Fatty' I'd be surprised.
Yes I'd expect a blacksmith to be stronger and more accustomed to heat.
These aren't things you have to 'book keep'. You can just apply the stat alterations if the characters stats come up using common fucking sense.
While you're at it make stat for every tree type, I don't want my players cheating difficult terrain when some tree branches are tougher than others.
I don't give females a negative, I just lower the female caps. In my 5e games, females can't start above 14 with point buy and can't go above 18 with ASI's
>A man sitting on the couch his whole life will be roughly the same strength as a woman doing the same thing
Ha, fucking christ son.
Find a man, any man, and find a woman leading an identical life - then look at their fucking strength. There is a reason women are considered to have roughly 1/3 a man's upper body strength and 2/3 a man's lower.
>Who cares if a female character has a 20 Str and can carry the entire party on her shoulders?
I don't think anyone cares, I mean, you crazy amazon fetishists can do whatever makes you happy.
>Aasimar, Genasi, Human, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling males get +1 Str, +1 Con, -2 Wis
Jesus Christ go kill yourself, you shouldn't be crippled as a mental character for having a dick you fucking retard
Are you one of those "Females should have only penalties and no benefits" guys?
>being this assblasted because of an autist
I thought having a dick makes you a man, not a little bitch.
Whats the stat caps on men?
I'm thinking they don't have one, female's just can't have anything above 18.
No, just annoyed at some autist thinking "Oh hurr durrmen are dumb" and doing that. Might as well give females +3 to Cha because he wants to fuck them or something, it's just dumb bullshit that does nobody any good.
Fair enough. Honestly, I'm not mad about the autism anymore, but I do want OP to kill himself for a shit bait thread. That I admittedly took.
Gotta agree with
The point of racial stat adjustments is to ensure that these races feel different, play different.
Racial and gender based stat tweaks make a basic sense, because they are different.
It is neither pointless bookkeeping, nor hurtful misogyny - it is ensuring that those characters that are special are in fact special.
Your amazing Goliath mage can be special in spite of her not getting extra bonus Int. Your Orc rogue can be special in spite of no bonus Dex. Your Kobold Barbarian can kick ass even with the Str drop.
Some of you folks seem to have a major hard on for minmaxing your characters and are very butthurt over how a dash of reality in your game ruins your OP bullshit.
So what advantages do women get? From a game design perspective that doesn't sound very good.
You rarely see any but men in, "hold my beer," situations. I think that is a Wisdom check friend.
>Racial and gender based stat tweaks make a basic sense, because they are different.
So what's the male stat penalties?
Well, I'm told here than being female is having easy mode on life, so it must be something worthy.
>but I do want OP to kill himself for a shit bait thread.
Well, I can't argue against that, user.
>Literal putting a glass ceiling into your game
>The point of racial stat adjustments is to ensure that these races feel different, play different.
they ultimately don't. The half orc fighter with 20 STR is not much different to play than the human fighter with 18 STR. Class, abilities, etc do far more to differentiate playstyle than stats. If you really want a race that "plays different" then you should go back to the race as class concept.
and you're pretty damn insecure about what some random person does in his game
That and all races have the same stat caps. A halfling can make it to 20 str in 5e.
It's kinda funny when kobolds and haflings can get to Str 20 but a half orc women apparently can't.
What makes races different are their racial abilities. An elven rogue will have cantrips.
A dwarven rogue can prance around in medium armor using heavier weapons and will be tanky.
D&D should focus on those instead of (sometimes half of) fucking meaningless +/- 5% modifiers.
I don't use gender stat modification because playable characters and NPCs important enough for me to bother fully statting are going to be far from the norm for their race and sex by default. That being said, among a group of more or less ordinary people, I generally make any guards or soldiers male, and statted accordingly, unless I have a spcific reason to do otherwise. For the same reason I don't use racial modifications either, instead in certain instances having either specific rules if called for (IE, halflings can't use mandatory 2H weapons), or no baked in difference. But again, I apply differences to normies of each race at my discretion.
>le -4 str meme
40 years and still going strong, i see.
The image of a barbarian halfling bitchslapping the half orc female cleric is hilarious to me.
Just because sexual dimorphism is realistic doesn't mean its worth the asspained arguments
That's a point. A hafling barbarian can get to str 24. The half orc female? Yeah, stuck at 18.
>A man sitting on the couch his whole life will be roughly the same strength as a woman doing the same thing, or so close it doesn't matter.
I'm actually baffled at how people can believe this. Do you not know any women who aren't athletic?
>But again, fantasy game. Who cares if a female character has a 20 Str and can carry the entire party on her shoulders?
Some people want more verisimilitude in their game. If that's not for you, no harm done. But to insinuate that somehow fantasy game means "anything goes" is beyond ridiculous.
No it’s not.
He also has to prove he’s not a virgin by repeating memes he thinks will make him look cool.
No, fuck off. Minimal variations are way better at ensuring character diversity as meatier bonuses will just encourage min maxing.
In 5e all races excluding beast races only have positive modifiers, which is the new excuse I use for the -4 Str meme.
Literally everything about dnd is pointless bookkeeping. Play fate or similar shit if you don't want that.
>But to insinuate that somehow fantasy game means "anything goes" is beyond ridiculous.
Indeed, we may break square cube law by every second monster, have 80% of characters cast physics breaking spells by default, have a multiple midget player races that take no penalty to strength, but a female PC being allowed to have the same STR bonus as a male of her race is crossing the line!
>It's bad if a person playing as a 3 and a half foot tall character will be seriously impeded if trying to play as a barbarian
>verisimilitude
That just doesn't fit with the flying dragons.
Also, as stated above, the average halfling being stronger than a female is just silly.
Upper body strength... they do't even reach!
This is why meatier bonuses have to be things that every class can enjoy. Cantrips are useful for everyone, regardless of class. Faster movement speed is good for everyone, regardless of class. Being able to reroll dice is good for everyone, regardless of class. Having an undershirt that stops you from getting knocked out at 0 is good for any class. Etc.
Meaningful, non-class specific bonuses are great. Meaningless numerical bonuses do shit all to differentiate races.
>Tiefling gender differences.
They have literal demon-blood. They are supernatural freaks. There's no reason for significant gender differences.
To be fair, there's also no reason NOT to have them.
Of course, your heritage is probably way more important for that than your gender.
Are you genuinely illiterate? Even ignoring that your post is nothing but a straw man, I don't know how somebody could read my post and come up with such absolute drivel.
>That just doesn't fit with the flying dragons.
Uh, yes it does? I'd recommend you to look up the term if you don't know what it is. Verisimilitude doesn't mean "everything has to be lifelike". It's something pretty subjective. If someone has no problem with dragons, but has a problem with non existent falling damage from water, that's totally fine.
Also, yeah, it's completely legit for somebody to desire smaller races to be limited in their strength.
I think its because there was a supplement which had this (Unearthed Arcana? Not a D&D fan so don't know), so because it was official, they have to keep it going even though there is no reason for it.
Lets be honest, no one is statting random NPCs anyway.
And try and force those changes on a player...
Oh +5 STR, +5 CON obviously.
Those sort of negatives.
CHA penalty
>what do you do to make your genders different in your pen and paper games?
stats-wise, nothing
My rule of thumb is don't distinguish genders when it comes to PC stats, do distinctions between NPCs whenever you feel like.
The problem is that a lot of people just use gender stat differences as an excuse to make female characters shitty, giving them stat penalties and no bonuses in return. Imagine you have orc with a -4 racial modifier to intelligence, but no racial bonus to strength. Why would anyone play the orc?
Making purposely bad choices is the pinnacle of bad game design.
But stats do change according to occupation. Are you new?
I'm glad you asked! First of all, I wouldn't let any of my players pick female as their gender in most of our campaigns. However, if that wasn't the case, females get the template as following:
-1 IQ
-1 S
Social Stigma (valuable property)
Callous
Most of their attributes will be caped at 11 or so.
Are the typos part of your character or are you just too lazy to troll properly?
English isn't a main language in my land of origin. I am serious and I'm not trolling.
So you just do it out of raging senseless autism then?
You should probably aim your retard rockets towards something for useful to the world.
...
Oh please, everyone knows there are no female Kobolds. They are born in batches of 100 inside true dragon eggs, providing guards and servants to the lone true dragon born in a clutch until it no longer needs them.
pls don't crush my scalie dreams
I think a lot of people posting here forget this is a game.
Games have house rules, they have workshopped things that people agree to. If the DM says, "guys we're playing a game in a steampunk world," and everyone agrees, then they can expect guns and tesla coils and Frankenstien's monster. If the DM says, "alright folks, this campaign we will all be rolling the stats in front of eachother to prevent any kind of fudging," and everyone agrees, then that is how it is.
So if the DM and the players all agree that sexual dimorphism happens in their game, then cool, it does. And if they don't want it to happen, it doesn't, no harm and no foul either way.
I dunno, I once saw a comic...
...Seemed to imply...
Come on OP, this is just mental masturbation you do to make yourself feel clever and you posted it here to try and increase that feeling. Its the same with world building
...Some kind of...
If you wanted realism, you'd give women:
>-4 str
Women are physically so weak that only the top 1% of women are stronger than the average man.
>-2 dex
The difference is less pronounced there, but professions which require good hand-eye coordination are dominated by men.
>-4 con
See Endurance sports, military performance, etc. Men can last longer and recover faster.
>int equal
Women and men have similar IQ scores. I'm tempted to give women a -2 to it because of their apparent incapability to use logic, but we'll call it even.
>wis equal
Again, no great difference between genders. Although all the great thinkers in history have been men, there is the chance that women just haven't had the chance to shine. Again tempted to -2 it, but we'll call it even.
>-2 cha
The vast majority of leaders have been men. Women generally have much less of a commanding presence than men, and are less good at commanding others. This can be traced back to traditional gender roles in humans, and our long history of evolution.
But here'd the kicker: people play RPGs because they want to have fun. If they think playing a woman could be fun, let them do so without any penaltied, because fuck realism when you're just trying to enjoy yourselves. Peace.
...Feminine Kobold...
...
...I hope.
More women are in college than men and women also go through puberty earlier and are often better at talking. Therefore women should be at 11 for mental stats instead of men.
Or you could just not be retarded and recognize its fantasy and you should be able to play what you want without having to worry about your fucking sex
To be fair, more women get into college because they have a lot more financial assistance to do so. I knew several guys whose scores were fucking insane that refused to consider university because without someone else footing the bill they'd be in debt for a decade if they were lucky.
females (male) get +2 to sexual harasment
Some have innnies, others have outies.
I really don't get the violent reeing that people have over this concept as long as its not "-4 STRENGTH". The way you described it in OP is very similar to how the elder scrolls did it until skyrim, where the differences aren't based on biology but on the culture of that specific race en.uesp.net
If your point was that those that try to shove realism into games don't know anything about realism and tend to be stupid we already know that
You're confusing the freedom to do what you want with the freedom to do what you want without judgement from others. The former is a right the latter isn't.
You're free to have sexual dimorphism house rules in your setting. We are free to observe that you have crippling autism for desiring to have sexual dimorphism house rules in your setting.
>the difference between genders is far greater than the difference between different species entirely