Quote from: Kiero;1104511This is the problem; Dex lumps together both fine motor skill (hand-eye co-ordination and spatial visualisation) and gross motor skill (full body co-ordination and kinaesthetic awareness).

This is part of why I enjoy GURPS' "Hamfisted" and "Bad Grip" traits which modify base DX for certain subsets of tasks along with things like Talents and etc.

The Conanist self eval:

S:16 I: 12 W: 12 D: 8 Cn: 14 Ch: 8

Put me in the "Fantasy RPG" camp. A 40 lb Halfling is about equivalent to a 5 year old kid. Tough to see them doing much damage to a grown man, let alone Ogres, Giants, etc. Do they all have 3 strength in the simulationist game?

Seeing some of these women's UFC fighters with 1st round KO power, I wouldn't take them lightly with a weapon in their hand even though they can't put up as much on the bench.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1104374Maybe I'm wrong, but this whole "females should get -X STR" and "females are equally strong as men" both stink of politics.

Correct. Which is why you should roll for your stats.  

And in any case, any two individuals will vary more than any two groups within the human species. And in rpgs, we play individual characters, not entire genders, ethnic groups or whatever. Which is why you should roll for your stats.

Plus, when you point-buy, there's always some dweeb who says, "but I don't have enough points for my character concept." Which is why you should roll for your stats.

Quote from: RazorI'm curious how we would each rate ourselves, regarding the six abilities?

Lol. Years back we had this on the GURPS forum. Even the guy on disability pension was a 200 point character. This is the question to find out who lives in Lake Wobegon.

You guys have devolved to statting yourselves?
Yikes.  
That never works out well.

How about just rolling or creating characters who are fun to play without involving sexist stereotypes"
That sort of stuff just interferes with playing the darn game.

- Ed C.

One other way to look at it is that Strength and Size should be different characteristics and women are generally smaller.  That allows the mechanical advantage of strength for success rolls and so on while reducing hit points and damage output.

Quote from: Koltar;1104556You guys have devolved to statting yourselves?
Yikes.  
That never works out well.

How about just rolling or creating characters who are fun to play without involving sexist stereotypes"
That sort of stuff just interferes with playing the darn game.

What sexist stereotypes?

Quote from: David Johansen;1104560women are generally smaller

That will be next on the everyone is equal chopping block.

Quote from: Conanist;1104543A 40 lb Halfling is about equivalent to a 5 year old kid. Tough to see them doing much damage to a grown man, let alone Ogres, Giants, etc. Do they all have 3 strength in the simulationist game?

Can you have a 5 year old kid with an 18 strength in a non-simulationist game?

Quote from: mightybrain;1104571Can you have a 5 year old kid with an 18 strength in a non-simulationist game?

Yes? Probably a super hero game. Or horror!

Quote from: mightybrain;1104570That will be next on the everyone is equal chopping block.

It's fine for women to be bigger than men, but with less muscular strength.  Not fat, just big-boned.  But how do you reflect size in ability scores, without it being indicative of strength?

Quote from: S'mon...If the D&D game were modelling IRL then male PCs would average around +3 higher STR...

If modeling real-life, and assuming that the strength score is raw strength, and if assuming the average strength of a male character is 10.5, then the average non-athletic (non-fighter) female would be about 5 and the average athletic (fighter) female would be about 6. Female maximum strength would be around 9 and 10 respectively.

A simple way to implement this would be to treat the strength score as one-half its actual score for any activity involving upper body strength. This is reasonable when one considers that mediocre male athletes who "transition" to female suddenly become #1 athletes when competing with actual females -- even top female athletes struggle against mediocre male specimens. Admittedly, this is probably too much reality for most gamers, but given that magic is a great equalizer (gauntlets of ogre strength, and so on) I don't see why that should be so.

(The absolute difference in bench press between non-athlete males and females is 116.7% and between swimmer males and females is 75.0% [Sex difference in muscular strength in equally-trained men and women, Phillip Bishop, Human Performance Laboratory, University of Alabama, et. al., published in Ergonomics, 1987, Vol. 30, No. 4])

Overall, I think that AD&D does a good job of balancing fantasy with reality.

Quote from: jhkimIf I look at jobs that depend on physical strength -- like bar bouncers, loggers, or construction workers -- I find a very clear predominance of men, with 99% being common. However, if I look at jobs that depend on competitive social skills - like managers, ambassadors, trial lawyers, politicians - I don't see a huge predominance of women. If women outclassed men in social skill equally to strength, I would expect to see women in 99% of these positions. What do you think is preventing women from dominating these fields?...

Agreeableness, lack of interest, and a flatter intelligence curve.

Agreeableness means that women are easier to walk all over and take advantage of in cut-throat, competitive environments. Women are much less likely to abandon their children and friends to work 80 hours a week. And there are fewer female geniuses (but also fewer female morons).

The bottom line is that women are optimized by evolution for creating and interacting with children, whereas men are optimized for hunting, politics, and war. This hyper-specialization has likely made Homo sapiens superior to other human species -- imagine a hyper-specialized NFL football team vs a generic football team with no specialization; imagine Tom Brady vs an average quarterback. This gives the children of modern Homo sapiens a huge advantage in terms of their ability to survive, learn, adapt, and excel.

Traditionally there have always been two dominance hierarchies -- one for men and one for women, and they were generally orthogonal to each other. Modern society denigrates the housewife (one of the most important jobs), and as such the female dominance hierarchy has largely been abrogated and it has been written out of history, such that we are given the false narrative that males dominated and oppressed females historically. That is a partial truth; on the battlefield it was true, but on the home front usually the opposite was true. In fact, in the medieval world women often ran estates and dominated urban businesses. True, women couldn't vote, but people forget (or pretend to forget) that women often controlled, or at the very least had great influence over, their husbands; men who made their wives unhappy usually paid a heavy price. Men were functionaries acting in service to their families, voting on their behalf. Healthy families are not, and never were, dictatorships. Given that families are the traditional units of society, one vote per (land-holding) family certainly makes sense in the Ancient world.

The result of the abrogation of the female hierarchy is that females are now forced to compete in male hierarchies, and predictably they struggle. Even when they do well by traditional male standards, they have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and other forms of mental illness. Men stripped of their careers and identities suffer similarly.

That said, the most brilliant achievement of Western civilization is the sovereignty of the individual, the freedom of each individual to pursue happiness in their own way. I think this is captured quite well in AD&D's balancing of fantasy and reality, as I noted above, and in any case AD&D's ability scores are abstract, not concrete measures of anything in particular. Abstraction is a powerful tool and one must be careful not to over-rationalize.

Quote from: Cloyer Bulse;1104586If modeling real-life, and assuming that the strength score is raw strength, and if assuming the average strength of a male character is 10.5, then the average non-athletic (non-fighter) female would be about 5 and the average athletic (fighter) female would be about 6. Female maximum strength would be around 9 and 10 respectively.

That's borked.  There is no plausible way that you can make an argument that the strongest women are still weaker than the average man.  What is this based on?  

And why would you turn to real-life in a fantasy world.  Apparently some people have dragon- or demon-blood from a few generations ago that gives them unusual traits (like Socererous magic), so why wouldn't someone every few generations show some unusual (for a human) Strength?

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1104590That's borked.  There is no plausible way that you can make an argument that the strongest women are still weaker than the average man.  What is this based on?

Maybe not totally average. But go just very slightly above average and men start winning at everything that requires strength.

[video=youtube;MF-YeWnIJfU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF-YeWnIJfU[/youtube]

She looks way stronger than every single guy in the video, and yet only manages to beat a dude that looks like a strong breeze would blow him over. And she is supposed to be the world's strongest woman (at that point in time anyway).

I don't think people truly grasp how much more powerful men are, specially in upper body strength.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1104590That's borked.  There is no plausible way that you can make an argument that the strongest women are still weaker than the average man.  What is this based on?  

[video=youtube;OsnaiuPPNr4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsnaiuPPNr4[/youtube]

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1104590And why would you turn to real-life in a fantasy world.  Apparently some people have dragon- or demon-blood from a few generations ago that gives them unusual traits (like Socererous magic), so why wouldn't someone every few generations show some unusual (for a human) Strength?

How many times should people explain to you Reeeeeeing buffoons that:
A) Not all games are D&D/Fantasy
B) Even in those you might want to limit humans as a whole and model them more accurately.
C) You might want to include a sexually dimorphic species where the weaker sex is the male.

So leaving the gym last night, after spending the evening playing with my daughters and tucking them into bed, troglodyte that I am I thought to ask my wife what she thought of about our little debate here.  The conversation is relayed below, more or less verbatim.  

Me:  Hey, I want to ask you a question.

Wife:  Okay.

Me: As a female person -  sorry, a person with a vagina..

Wife:

Me: Do you find the idea that men are considerably stronger than women offensive?

Wife:  How can it be offensive? It's true.

Me:  Okay, good.  Same page.  What about the statement that women are considerably more socially aware and adept than men?

Wife:  Again, how can that be offensive? It's true.

Q.E.D. gents, Q.E.D.