Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Sex and D&D
All I'm going to say about the discussion regarding sex and ability scores is this: the same people complaining about ability score mins/maxs, should also be complaining about height/weight tables. If they aren't, then it's just correctness talking and take those folks with a grain of salt. That is all.
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Agreed. I also suspect that Gygax was profiling populations with his 1E tables and that in the rare event that a PC suffer from the max it would be reasonable to simply say they were an exception.
ReplyDeleteLastly, the above 3 minimums force you to discard the PC or pick a different race... a vastly more likely occurrence than having to lower an 18, and one that should provoke much more anger in this age of entitlement.
It's unclear what you're saying here, but the difference between the height and weight tables vs. ability scores is that one has an effect on the game's mechanics and the other doesn't.
ReplyDeleteThe actual sex-based ability score modifiers (which are mainly to Str IIRC) are flawed and incomplete if they are intended to model actual sex differences. They strike me as poor simulation that adds nothing to the game.
Agreed they are poorly conceived and implemented.
ReplyDeleteHeight, but especially weight, can have an in-game effect. At least in the games that I play. So I'm not really clear on exactly what you are saying either.
I think this is all just tempest in a teapot.
Both of these things are products of a different culture. Gygax and Co. were a bunch of really smart and creative guys, but they were also white men living in a small Midwestern town in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that many people would have had something to say about that table and the stereotypes it promotes if Wizards had brought it up...which they didn't.
More importantly, if you really think this discussion is not worthwhile, stop having it.
"but they were also white men living in a small Midwestern town in the 1970s."
DeleteWhich, of course, isn't stereotyping at all.
If that was what I was doing (it's not) would it invalidate my point?
DeleteThe average man is stronger than the average woman. The strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman. If that is all there is to it, I don't really see what the big deal is. Either way, no campaign will be a success or failure depending on whether the referee enforces that rule, so it's not something worth drawing a line in the sand over.
ReplyDeleteZ.