There are many reasons why. Here are some in brief:
1) The attributes in D&D and most other Method I games are not precise enough conceptually to be able to accurately model sex differences. Dexterity is a good example of this, since it mashes together a bunch of different abilities including gross motor coordination, fine motor coordination, proprioception and kinesthesia, all of which have different statistical ranges of ability between the sexes. Which one of these concepts should dominate?
2) The attributes in D&D and most other Method I games are not precise enough numerically to be able to accurately model most sex differences. Most sex differences are fairly statistically minor. To actually model the difference, there needs to be at least a 5.5% difference in maximum values (which is about the value of 1 pt. of a stat in D&D). Most sex differences are nowhere near there. There are a small number that are great enough to overcome this threshold, but these do not uniformly favour men in real life, whereas in old school D&D they uniformly do.
3) Sex-based differences tend to ignore obvious areas in which women do better than men. The most obvious are in life expectancy, overall health, and pain tolerance. If one wants to model sex-based differences in D&D using the "stat limit" system, then by the same logic by which women's Strength is limited, men's Constitution should be limited. I am, so far as I know, the only person who has ever proposed this, and I find it has no traction even amongst people who bang on about the virtues of sex-based attribute differences for realism's sake (who are all themselves men). Similar cases can be made for other attributes as well - Wisdom, where men might experience lower caps due to a greater predilection for serious mental illness.
4) Sex-based differences tend to assume that men are the norm and women are exception or alterations to that norm, when of course the opposite is true both statistically and embryologically. It would make more sense to treat women as the norm if we are interested in realism, and modify men's stats, rather than vice versa. 3-18 should represent the range of a women's capabilities, with men mostly overlapping with that range.
I will set aside the "It's sexist" and "It expresses hostility to female players" and "It tells female players that you think they are inferior to men" because they are all so obviously true as to not require further elaboration.
I don't see what sex-based attributes actually contribute positively to the game, since the "realism" argument here is so baseless for the reasons given above that one might as well right "Chicks Blow!" on your forehead in sharpie. It adds an additional level of complication during character creation, it is poor simulation, it causes one to avoid choosing to play a group comprising over half the species, and the differences between individuals is already captured in the individual's instantiation of the 3-18 range already. It's positive contributions to complexity of choice and gameplay are... Nothing.
Wait, so you mean women aren't hotter than men and thus shouldn't get a comeliness bonus? MY PARADIGM, IT IS SHIFTED! ;)
ReplyDeleteI tried to stick with only stats I think should exist.
DeleteIn fact an old issue of Dragon had a similar point to #3 and argued women should have the advantage in CON (biologically I think it may be tied to childbirth ... a woman's body needs to be able to survive tremendous stress to carry and labor a baby! ... the article may have also pointed out females have better endurance, all things being equal)
ReplyDeleteIn practice, the STR maximums for females in AD&D were not terribly debilitating -- IIRC it mainly affected exceptional scores. Maybe I'm just thinking of half-orcs and dwarves though. In any event it was racial maximums for attributes more than sex-based maximums. I agree they don't really add anything but I am not so sure they make the game a 'hostile environment'. We're not talking about the kind of attribute modifiers heaped on females in a game like Fantasy Wargaming (which was trying to enforce the severe sexism of the 'real' middle ages with them!).
It's definitely not the most pressing issue in the world, I agree. But I do think that they contribute to a sense of exclusion. When I imagine what it's like to be a woman sitting at a table with someone explaining this rule to me, it's hard to think I'd come away with a positive impression of either the game or the person insisting we use it, especially if I had just rolled 18 (always an exciting event in char creation) and was looking forward to playing a powerful fighter.
DeleteThese arguments only exist because obese or scrawny, piss-weak, clumsy and unfit gamer boys want to feel there's SOMEONE out there weaker than them, preferably a whole class of someones.
ReplyDeleteThe game system does not exist to boost your fragile self-esteem.
On the GURPS forums, someone once offered a "female" template, with their beginning with less strength, etc. I offered in turn a "middle class" template, a "working class" template, etc. The middle class while well-off were more prone to greed and cowardliness, the working class more prone to drug, alcohol and gambling addiction, but had more streetwise, and so on. It did not go down well :D
"As they lack protective pigmentation, whites must test whenever they are outdoors for longer than 60 minutes to avoid sunburn. Halve the duration when the sun is particularly bright, and double it if they are wearing protective clothing covering 90% or more of their body or protective unguents."
DeleteOn the other hand, all "nerd's just wanna feel strong stuff", i'm a man in my thirties of very average strength and size, and the women at the same height as me do not hold a torch in terms of strength. I've never bothered to model this much in a system though, save by insisting that a female with high strength stats is not visualized as some Hollywood starlet with arms the size of french bread.
ReplyDeleteI tend to favour representing variations through the dice rather than changes in averages. So women may be less strong than men on average (and empirically, they are), but if a woman PC rolls an 18, then she is one of the few women who has strength well above that of the average man.
DeleteIan, I'm guessing the women you've met don't work out.
DeleteI'm a personal trainer, my 2 strongest clients at the moment are women. A trained woman will generally be stronger than an untrained man. This causes untrained men great distress, but they should get flabby arses into the gym, or stop complaining.
Trained man > trained woman
Trained man >> untrained woman
Untrained man > untrained woman
Untrained man < trained woman
When they roll high strength for their characters, male or female, I just assume they're trained. Incidentally, I always thought that was the idea behind the "fighter-only" percentile strength rule in AD&D - only a fighter would get the special training required to achieve that level. Think Spartacus - Blood & Sand, carrying logs and all that stuff.
This set of rules have always bothered me and I've always ignored them. There is no way to reasonably model the complexity of human physiology in a role-playing game so the idea of enforcing different stats based on genders just compounds the lack of detail.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in some systems that I've run, female characters have had to pay slightly higher experience costs for learning skills that are culturally unlikely for them to learn. An example would be Lace and Steel where female characters have to pay a higher price to start will skills in musket, pistols and fencing. After initial purchase the player is no longer penalized for learning the skill and progresses normally.