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Also, just like in science fiction, magic warriors can often have assistance, such as through enchanted armor and weapons or alteration/enchantment spells, to make them stronger or to make their equipment feel lighter in their hands (oftentimes ONLY their hands).

Edit: Wrong reply to wrong thread

edit: also wrong thread

Edit: I fail at posting please delete

 Amaya wrote:
Ironically you might be able to justify a mage of any type being physically stronger than a warrior.

Real life example, if you see a huge, ripped soldier he's probably a POG and actually has time to go to the gym and train. Infantrymen are rarely physically impressive speciments. If anything there is a serious upper limit on the importance of raw strength as a melee fighter. Your heaviest sword is going to top out at around 10lbs, which isn't much at all. Endurance, grip strength, agility and skill will be much more important than raw strength. Especially since some weapons are actually absurdly sharp (such as Obsidian) and will cut through flesh effortlessly.

That's the modern soldier. Who isn't a focused melee fighter.

In melee combat, physical strength frankly plays a very important role, not as much as skill, but in actual, historical medieval combat with a longsword, do you know what one of the most essential aspects of the German School of Swordsmanship was?

Wrestling, pinning your opponent, and finishing him off with a dagger. Indeed, wrestling, or "Ringen", was essential to swordplay.

Ten pounds doesn't sound like much (And indeed, most zweihanders are not that large), but carrying and wielding it for an extended amount of time, and swinging it consistently with speed and precision, takes some amount of strength.

Obsidian will cut through flesh easily. It is indeed extremely sharp. But it is also brittle, much moreso than steel or even iron. And because of that, it would be very unreliable as a weapon for cutting through armour, especially say, plate mail, which an RPG warrior is likely to use and encounter. They dull very quickly.

Not to mention someone being "ripped" is frankly a poor indication of whether or not they are physically strong or endurant. Also, my computer seems to think endurant is not a word, but a quick google search told me it is.

Suck it Windows!

Strength is not everything, but it is a very useful tool to have in martial combat. As much as skill? No. But I'd say it is equal with agility, honestly, and is, if you're doing it right, related to endurance. There is an important distinction between the pseudo-bodybuilder muscles you seemed to be talking about, and the muscle of a strong, trained warrior, or for a modern example a Strongman.

Also, I figure I might as well post on-topic once in this thread.

Why? If the game lets you determine your starting characteristics, then gender doesn't need to play a role, and shouldn't because it will be limiting for your options. The only real exception I have in mind for differences between gender stats is the Elder Scrolls, which aspires to start you off as a typical member of your race and gender, a sort of everyman (Or woman, heh), who becomes something great. Which has been a theme since the beginning. Though interestingly, even then, strength was rarely differentiated between gender. Imperials in Oblivion and Morrowind I remember started with 40 strength, both gender. Nords with 50. Orcs with 45. IIRC Redguard did have a difference, 50 for the male, 40 for the female, but that is the only strength-based one I recall.

A strongman would be a terrible melee fighter in sustained combat. This has been show many times before by such athletes attempting to cross over into the MMA and getting winded in the first round. In an open environment, I'll take the medium sized fighter with endurance over the massive brute twice his size that can't handle running a half mile.

From my understanding, once you get past the lower levels, the choice between endurance and brute strength can often be mutually exclusive.

Then again, to bring up MMA again, the womens' MMA fights often only lasted one round. This wasn't because the women didn't have the endurance, it was because the women were a thousand times more aggressive than the men. Mental aggression combined with discipline is probably the most important thing for a fighter regardless of if it's sword-swinging or gun-slinging.

Many people here probably have never had a heavy job. There's no way that any of the girls I know could do my job, though I'm sure there are plenty of women who could. And it is *much* easier for men to gain muscle than for women.

Whether or not you should express such in an RPG is debatable. I'd prefer to leave it to roleplay simply because to base it on gender would be perceived to be sexist and any company/game maker doesn't want to put off female gamers.

 Amaya wrote:
A strongman would be a terrible melee fighter in sustained combat. This has been show many times before by such athletes attempting to cross over into the MMA and getting winded in the first round. In an open environment, I'll take the medium sized fighter with endurance over the massive brute twice his size that can't handle running a half mile.

I decided to actually look up notable strongmen to actually see their fight records.

Most don't have any, but of what I saw, one went into boxing, has fought three matches, and won them all. One was a former kickboxing champion in his younger years. Mariusz Pudzianowsski has an MMA record that is more or less decent. He also beat up Butterbean, which I find kind of funny for whatever reason.

Many of them however seem to also serve as firefighters or policeman, weirdly, and the former especially requires a great deal of endurance.

Not to mention, many modern, successful MMA fighters are physically very strong, and make use of that. Cain Velasquez, current UFC heavyweight champion, outpowered Brock Lesnar, himself definitely a very physically powerful man, for example.

Also, do you intend to actually address the rest of my post, or no?

 BryllCream wrote:
Many people here probably have never had a heavy job. There's no way that any of the girls I know could do my job, though I'm sure there are plenty of women who could. And it is *much* easier for men to gain muscle than for women.

Whether or not you should express such in an RPG is debatable. I'd prefer to leave it to roleplay simply because to base it on gender would be perceived to be sexist and any company/game maker doesn't want to put off female gamers.

Don't even go there.

I've worked three summers moving furniture, dug holes all damn day as a plumber's apprentice, worked with a contractor doing all the physical labor his diabetic obese behind couldn't handle, and have probably spent more time under a barbell in the past year than most people do in a decade. Just because I'm advocating gender equality on a wargaming website doesn't mean I'm some skinny fat prick who thinks women are equal because some cheerleader beat me in armwrestling.

Given the amount of veterans on this site and other individuals who I know/am pretty sure have done physical labor or played football/rugby making such an accusation is asinine and rude.

 BryllCream wrote:
Many people here probably have never had a heavy job. There's no way that any of the girls I know could do my job, though I'm sure there are plenty of women who could. And it is *much* easier for men to gain muscle than for women.

Whether or not you should express such in an RPG is debatable. I'd prefer to leave it to roleplay simply because to base it on gender would be perceived to be sexist and any company/game maker doesn't want to put off female gamers.

I unload trucks of often heavy freight for a living at the moment, some individual pieces weighing nearly 300 pounds (Which you should team lift, no one doubts your might, but doing that gak regularly without aid can feth your back up), so I can see what you are saying. I can think of no women in my life off the top of my head as strong as me (Though I do set an impossibly high standard, being the mightiest being in creation), but IMO PCs are, in most games, meant to be exceptional. A cut to strength for women is too restrictive for character-building, IMO, to implement in most scenarios.

 Void__Dragon wrote:

 Amaya wrote:
A strongman would be a terrible melee fighter in sustained combat. This has been show many times before by such athletes attempting to cross over into the MMA and getting winded in the first round. In an open environment, I'll take the medium sized fighter with endurance over the massive brute twice his size that can't handle running a half mile.

I decided to actually look up notable strongmen to actually see their fight records.

Most don't have any, but of what I saw, one went into boxing, has fought three matches, and won them all. One was a former kickboxing champion in his younger years. Mariusz Pudzianowsski has an MMA record that is more or less decent. He also beat up Butterbean, which I find kind of funny for whatever reason.

Many of them however seem to also serve as firefighters or policeman, weirdly, and the former especially requires a great deal of endurance.

Not to mention, many modern, successful MMA fighters are physically very strong, and make use of that. Cain Velasquez, current UFC heavyweight champion, outpowered Brock Lesnar, himself definitely a very physically powerful man, for example.

Also, do you intend to actually address the rest of my post, or no?

No. You assumed I was refering to bodybuilders, which isn't entirely true and it was mainly things I agree on. You need some strength, but it has diminishing returns after a point and can come at the cost of endurance and quickness.

Perhaps for those too weak of mind to have it all, like I do.

Anyways I've changed my position on this it does seem arbitrary and pointless to have these stat differences and besides RPG's are about creating the character you want.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Perhaps for those too weak of mind to have it all, like I do.

Physical endurance is not equivalent to mental strength.

Some of the most powerful minds humanity has ever produced and, the most unbreakable wills humanity has ever had, have been in some of the most ill and fragile bodies.

 Melissia wrote:

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Perhaps for those too weak of mind to have it all, like I do.

Physical endurance is not equivalent to mental strength.

Some of the most powerful minds humanity has ever produced and, the most unbreakable wills humanity has ever had, have been in some of the most ill and fragile bodies.

We're not going to get into doctor X from x-men are we? Of course he isn't real but i'm just saying.

Personally i find going through a lot matters more. What i find most pathetic is when somebody brags and brags with all their various muscles and they end up being more cowardly than anybody else. Don't boast unless you can back it up. It sickens me greatly honestly. For instance my roommate is kind of a d*uche and he is a fairly strong guy and boasts a lot but despite me hating scary things more he freaks out infinitely more often and easily and often says things aren't scary when he's scared. As his brother said he's the biggest bullsh*tter he knows (or of all time). That has to tell you something.

On that subject i kind of hate my new roommate or hate living with him but he does bring some good things and isn't a d*ck to me. He sounds like a generally terrible person to women and weak men in general though. You know a typical d*uche type *sshole that eats some of my food without asking first but at least admits it. I let him stay here because he needed an apartment to stay in though i'm sure he's just using me. Honestly though he's decent to me it sort of destroys me watching him hurt others that he says he's going to hurt and he doesn't feel a thing for it and doesn't care because he has the looks to get away with it.

-------------------------

If you want to take strong minds take people that are tortured or have been through concentration camps or otherwise lost a lot. I've lost a lot myself by most first world people's standards and i'm just a skinny 140-150 lbs guy. Most people haven't had to lose their mother when they were still living at home and then forced to live halfway across the country with people they see once every 3 years for a 2-3 day span as the closest people they know. Seriously i didn't know anybody including the people taking care of me. It sucked. Losing your family members to cancer like i lost my mom sucks and yes she did suffer a lot. I could tell the full story but i don't want to think about it. It happened 6-7 years ago that all this took place when she died and i'm 25.

Even worse is that my mom's mom died from cancer in the same way and that's how she didn't want to die but did anyway. I don't like my sister and i know people say it doesn't pass down through family (maybe cancer isn't as easy to get rid of in women currently) but maybe my sister will die of cancer too. I don't want to see that happen.

All that said i've met people that have lost more (and i've lost more than i mentioned) so when i see others complain about less i generally feel insulted.

 BryllCream wrote:
Many people here probably have never had a heavy job. There's no way that any of the girls I know could do my job, though I'm sure there are plenty of women who could. And it is *much* easier for men to gain muscle than for women.

Whether or not you should express such in an RPG is debatable. I'd prefer to leave it to roleplay simply because to base it on gender would be perceived to be sexist and any company/game maker doesn't want to put off female gamers.

Or, as I already explained, just speculating about simulation like making men stronger, without any consideration for how people build characters, is absolutely terrible game design. Because the reality is that players don't sit down and make character choices based on what they want to play, and delight in all the realistic simulation the system is producing. They look at the system, and figure out how to make an effective character. Now that doesn't necessarily mean twinking the system to build some ridiculous munchkin abomination, but power level is certainly a factor - nobody wants to play an ineffective character.

And what that means is that if you give stat bonuses for things like gender, then people will choose whatever gender makes them more effective. If they want to play a thief then they will likely be looking to pick whatever bonuses boost their dexterity, and if that means being a chick so be it. Oh look, now you've got a game where every player character thief is always woman.

If you played D&D then you would have noticed that halflings were only ever thieves, and almost every thief was a halfling.

Point being, just speculating about what is realistic and building game mechanics, and paying no attention to how those game mechanics will be used by players in the game is terrible, terrible design.

 sebster wrote:
nobody wants to play an ineffective character.

Not true, just look at the people who play Monk in DnD 3.5.

Hey, monks have some uses!



... sometimes...




... shut up...

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Not true, just look at the people who play Monk in DnD 3.5.

True.

And yeah, there'll always be the person who tilts at windmills. I've got a mate who takes the Dwarves in Smallworld all the damn time, just to prove to the rest of us that they can be made to work. And hey, sometimes they do.

But to get really boring and ruin your joke (sorry), that kind of thing is the exception, not the rule, and the most popular choices are far and away the most common. So despite Shadowrun having magic capable characters across most races, I don't think I ever played in a game where the caster wasn't an elf. They were just the best way to make casters, so that's what everyone did.

I dunno, I've always had groups who sometimes deliberately play unexpected characters, like, Halfling Frenzied Berserkers. Just because.

I've seen games from the 70s and 80s where they limit the maximum a stat can go for women. I think their Str was limited, but I can't remember the 'balance' stat.
But, a better way to go is not to do it with hard limits. If a woman can't have her highest stat in Str, it still lets her max it if she has 2 maximum stat scores.

The trouble is, a stat isn't everything about that part of a character. A little old woman might be able to shift a hay-bail on her back, but has trouble opening a jar of pickles.

Cyberpunk 2020 worked out running speed as [something] +[Dex mod] -[Str mod], I think. Women ended up being faster, because of the way people built their character.

 Skinnereal wrote:
I've seen games from the 70s and 80s where they limit the maximum a stat can go for women. I think their Str was limited, but I can't remember the 'balance' stat.
But, a better way to go is not to do it with hard limits.

That's like saying "a better way to punch yourself in the face is with full knuckle".

 Skinnereal wrote:
I've seen games from the 70s and 80s where they limit the maximum a stat can go for women. I think their Str was limited, but I can't remember the 'balance' stat.
But, a better way to go is not to do it with hard limits. If a woman can't have her highest stat in Str, it still lets her max it if she has 2 maximum stat scores.

The trouble is, a stat isn't everything about that part of a character. A little old woman might be able to shift a hay-bail on her back, but has trouble opening a jar of pickles.

Cyberpunk 2020 worked out running speed as [something] +[Dex mod] -[Str mod], I think. Women ended up being faster, because of the way people built their character.

They where given a bonus to wisdom. The intent being to push female players into being clerics.

Which is to be expected out of something from the seventies, and rather backwards and stupid if you did it today.

Yep. It's strange how people keep dragging gender stereotypes around. Even when they fail to make sense anymore. I recall I was talking to someone about a si-fi setting where people all had there arms and legs replaced with robot parts. They where trying to argue that women couldn't be warriors because they don't have the arm power of men. I couldn't convince him that he made no sense.

We have the tech now for women to surpass natural male limits.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
I dunno, I've always had groups who sometimes deliberately play unexpected characters, like, Halfling Frenzied Berserkers. Just because.

"Sometimes" is, of course, exactly what I meant when I said "that kind of thing is the exception, not the rule"


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Skinnereal wrote:
But, a better way to go is not to do it with hard limits. If a woman can't have her highest stat in Str, it still lets her max it if she has 2 maximum stat scores.

That's just adding rules on top of rules, to 'solve' a problem that doesn't actually exist in play. And I say the problem doesn't exist in play, because no-one in the history of gaming has ever said 'oh this system is unplayable and every session has been unenjoyable because the female character is the strongest one in the party'.

But I know a lot of games that have broken down because the system has amassed a bizarre collection of rules about all kinds of pointless minutiae until no-one can be bothered any more.

The trouble is, a stat isn't everything about that part of a character. A little old woman might be able to shift a hay-bail on her back, but has trouble opening a jar of pickles.

Good point, and one that I think gets to a major part of the overall issue. We're not dealing with hyper detailed, accurate simulations that simulate every part of an attribute on a bio-mechanical level. We don't really care about the difference between upper arm strength and carrying strength and striking strength... we're just talking about a general descriptor. We just want to be able to say 'this guy is hulking brute' or 'this guy is quick on his feet'.

We're dealing with broad descriptions that help us, more or less, create characters that are about as detailed as characters in genre fiction. And that means defining a person in terms of what they're good at, and then getting on with it and seeing them do it.

 sebster wrote:

But I know a lot of games that have broken down because the system has amassed a bizarre collection of rules about all kinds of pointless minutiae until no-one can be bothered any more.

Roll for anal circumference!

 Leigen_Zero wrote:
I would say that while there is a noticable 'real world' difference (i.e. our lab-devised tests can determine that because of XYZ men are less ABC than women, and men are better at DEF because of LMN), when you scale things into a video game, those differences become largely unnoticable due to abstraction models.

I would say that unless your working in a percentile (x/100) system, there would be little difference between male/female dexterity and strength, particularly in the living conditions expressed in most fantasy tropes.

Sooooo, Leigen Zero Wins the thread in the first page, yet people are still yapping on about this?