JLH3's page

People who decide to argue, point by point, just to try and show how superior their 'facts' are, is really annoying.

Hey, I find lack of subject/verb agreement annoying. To each his own!

:P

I forgot Jim Holloway! That guy was the king of humorous illustrations. He was a skilled illustrator in the strict sense, plus he brought a level of humorous expression that I've never seen matched. He always had these big, busy pieces with someone in the foreground doing something serious, and one or more characters in the background making funny faces or laughing at the serious characters. He illustrated lots of D&D modules in the 80s. His piece for the Lost City with the sneaky, maniacally evil dwarf is hilarious.

That was one of my major put-offs for the older editions. To me, it automatically put you at a disadvantage to play a female or non-human fighter. I said Hallelujah when 3E chucked those mechanics that limited what your imagination would allow in a magic-filled fantasy game. Reality be-damned!

Optional rules be damned too? One way for all?

Without debating the veracity of any of these claims*, As you said, these are averages. The OP suggested that there be an even split in gender of our heroic characters. These heroic characters are decidedly non-average.

Heroes have averages, too. And as I pointed out, there's more to bell curves than the middle, which is probably why males crowd out females by a huge margin in the upper levels of math, for example. More relevantly, this is why sports are segregated by sex.

*Other estimates place female body strength on average at closer to 70% of males

70% is still quite a split.

IQ is affected by environment including education

True, but: environment is often an obscurantist crutch, and the current research suggests that IQ is significantly more nature than nurture.

men tend to talk more than women in many settings, etc.

True, and obviously, again, those are averages - plenty of quiet women and loquacious men.

Now, I do not want to get into an argument about whether women can put on plate mail and swing a longsword along with the men in the real world. It's pointless. And the reason it's pointless, is that nearly every 7th level fighter in plate mail I see has a belt of ogre strength, and mithral armor. So, real world is irrelevant. If a woman CAN become a fighter in heavy armor in an rpg game, even if it's NOT THE NORM, then you need a picture of that.

How's it pointless? The 7th level fighter presumably had lots of killin' to do with plain old +0 mail, wearing a +0 leather belt, on his way to becoming a 7th level fighter.

The real world isn't irrelevant. If it was, we could remove sex altogether and have worlds populated with Androgenites.

And just to repeat myself to avoid confusion, I don't mind that picture of a female in plate. The kind of thing I'm objecting to is made-up nonsense like "gender balance" (where we pretend the sexes are equal (literally) and so 1/2 of all knights must be women, etc.); stuff like having THE picture representing knighthood showing women and men standing together as if that's how Holy Orders are typically composed.

Again I don't mind this stuff in part of RPG-dom; I object to it as a Hegemonic Objective of the Great and the Good, as something to which all RPGs must adhere. I object to it as the norm.

Because otherwise, some women will be disinvited from ever getting into the hobby. As soon as I run into a group, just once, that refuses to let a young male player run a wizard because "Men can't multitask or act cautiously enough to realistically be a spellcaster in any fantasy campaign world," and have him flip through a rulebook looking for some evidence they're wrong, I'll take up the Gandalf Picture cause with equal fervor.

I sympathize, but I don't want games dragged en toto into PCdom to correct this problem. A paragraph or two on the matter will suffice.

Someone mentioned that a woman can't be a knight due to upper body strength.

Who? Tar and feather the cretin!

I know a woman who's 6'4" and can bench press 250lb.

While this may have destroyed your straw man, it does not impact my point at all.

So, while the majority of women (in or historically male dominated society) have less upper body strength than most men; it is not always the case. It should also be noted that historically, the strongest knight was not necessarily the best. Strength and reach are advantages in melee combat; but are by no means the end all, be all of it.

Historically, all the best knights were men. Historically, all the knights were men.

Anybody wonder why women and men don't compete in boxing? Is it really a mystery?

====

As for "cartoons," yes, I was confused as to the topic too. I LOVE the some of the old-school artists like Trampier (God why did he quit?), Roslof, Russ Nicholson (he rules), Gary Chalk, etc. I'd love to see an entire RPG with this kind of spot illustration, stuff that looks like modern reinterpretations of the woodcut.

You called?

<AC:12, prone>

Crikey!

Welcome on board. :)

Thanks. :)

JLH3 wrote:

I feel the need to stand up and say "you will not defame me with irrational PC hokum."

I am not defaming you.

To reiterate: I don't agree with you.

I should've phrased that more carefully - I don't think you were defaming me, or intended to do so. I was responding to the message of the links.

Seems my first reply was eaten so I'll try again:

Something of a threadjack, and I've no wish to indulge in debate here. But, being male, white and middle-class it's important that I stand up and say "I don't agree with you".

It's not so much a threadjack as a can of worms; I skimmed the pages (because they're nothing I've not seen before) and to keep it short, they're PC hokum that blame the victims of PC for the logically expected outcomes of PC.

And as a rational human (and a white male), I feel the need to stand up and say "you will not defame me with irrational PC hokum."

Corian of Lurkshire wrote:

Sacred cows and dead horses. Why am I not surprised?

Dead horse has been here?

Judging by that icon, there is at least one sacred cow I'm not going to mess with. Now I need to see Dead Horse's icon, might not want to go beating him, either. :)

How are you with halflings?

Heh, now that you mention it a halfling with a 20 STR is absurd too. Probably never gave it much thought because the art doesn't show them stuffed into plate alongside human males the same way.

I probably came on too strong in my post. I'm glad to see I haven't been roasted like my sacred cows. So, to reciprocate, let me say I'm ALL FOR an effort to highlight the female role, to a reasonable degree. For example, Joan of Arc stands out in history like a sore thumb; by rights she's an anomaly not an archetype - but who cares? She's a COOL thumb. By all means let's take that thumb and make an archetype out of it! It does give females an "in" that they can grab onto (not that that's the extent of Joan's coolness), and I have no problem at all with that.

I would recommend that you read

I'll take a look. I certainly have an open mind - just not an empty one. ;)

An almost entirely social construct, based on the fact that europe having been patriacle.

This is obviously false. The main reason PC revisionists have to look back and mutter about patriarchy is precisely the fact that males have twice the strength of females, hormones conducive to killing things, etc.

Woman are capable of forfilling any of the classes in the PRPG

Women are not as capable of fulfilling the "masculine" roles (knight, etc.) as men are.

it should be up to Settings to place sociatial restraints on characters, not a mechanics based restriction.

I disagree that mechanics have no place in with regard to sex differences. I think it's fine if one wants to pretend there are no sexual differences, and reflect that in mechanics, but it's balderdash to imply that I shouldn't have this courtesy reciprocated - I want a game where sexual differences are reflected, at least optionally, or at least have the lack thereof explained to me in a realistic fashion as suggested above (either explain why women are displayed in art with half (or less) the upper body mass of men, greater body fat (all those curves and less definition), but are just as strong; or don't explain the difference, and make women as big as men).

Why? Because the existence of sexes in games is based on the existence of sexes in real life.

(doesn't the "cake and eat it too" aspect of this bother anyone? On one hand guys like seeing svelte, waifish females, but on the other they want their STR to be that of Conan?)

I would love to see setting have the Balls to say, 'In this sociaty, you just don't get female palidins.' Or 'In neverwhere, wizards are exclusively female.' and give genuine, socitial reasons for these restrictions.

I'm actually against class restrictions based on social restrictions - who's to say that, even given a societal ban on a given sex in a given class, there can't be exceptions? E.g., how about a female doing the Eowyn thing? Or how about a disgruntled, retired paladin training a female for his own (possibly revolutionary) reasons? Obviously there are some exceptions to this logic, especially when class abilities overlap with social roles (e.g., can't go calling on your fellow Knights of the X if they know you're a woman and don't allow female members), or there's something about a class that's inherently X or Y (Aes Sedai).

I agree with my undead neighbour. It's a fantasy game after all where it should be possible to escape the gender stereotypes that you come across in real world.

I'm talking about sex differences, not "stereotypes." But that brings up another of my pet peeves, the use of "stereotype" as an ipso facto negative, even a pejorative. There are good stereotypes and bad stereotypes. Usage is obviously pushing it towards the negative, but I don't hold with that.

Is it already that far that we have to include clichés like the "women can't drive and men can't do two things at once"-thing into roleplaying?

Well, let's be precise here - women are safer drivers (hence their lower insurance premiums). I don't say things like "women can't drive." On the other hand, it's very reasonable to suppose that there's a physiological explanation for why one doesn't see many women driving race cars professionally, or flying fighter jets.

And women ARE better at multitasking, as far as I know (I haven't read the literature, but I've seen it referenced and alluded to often enough by rigorous people, not to mention reflected in my observations).

It's a fact that there were no female knights in the european middle-ages, but D&D never claimed to recreate the society of these times in the game. It's inspired by it, but it's not a historical RPG at all, it's fantasy. I like it that there are no differences in the stats between female and male characters. If somebody likes to include gender stereotypes in their games it's perfectly fine if everyone in the group is okay with it.

True, but as I said above, the "cake and eat it too" thing grates. If the sexes are equal, why don't they LOOK equal? Why are women still sexy-looking (from our POV)? Is there some magical property in women's musculature that lets them pack an equal amount of muscle into half (or less) the size? Isn't that actually superiority, not equality?

I don't mind fantasy. What I mind is double-standards, and PC activism masquerading as "fantasy."

But I wouldn't want to see stuff like that in the rules. These clichés are often a burden in the real world to men and women as well and I don't like this to enter into the joy of gaming.

I'm at the other end of the same stick: I see PC as a burden in real life and I don't see why I should have to pay for games that enforce the same memes onto my fantasies. I can see a market for it, sure, but why does it have to have hegemony over all of RPGdom?

Dual stats for male and female versions of the core-races would make the game unneccessary more complicated as well.

What would it take? About a half page, total? How much time would it add to character creation? A minute? Five, tops? After character creation I'm not seeing the complexity.

And you seem to think that reason is physical build... I would disagree.

It can be tough to disentangle nature and nurture, no argument there. The two form a continuum. But it's obvious that sex differences are at the bottom of the assignment of social roles to the sexes. Not to say that there wasn't any patriarchy going on, obviously.

If you're going to reject some perceived Sacred Cows, please try not to insert new ones

I have no sacred cows, as far as I know (okay I have a few, like the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, critical thinking, a hatred of censorship, etc). That is, any and all of my beliefs are up for (reasoned) debate. Usually, that's how they've become my beliefs in the first place.

I'm not just pulling that out of my arse - as far as I know (more of those references I've read about), women do have better social skills than men. This, plus their slight mean IQ advantage, might begin to explain why women outnumber men in college by a substantial margin.

I'd prefer the focus to be on showing off an adventure

Yes, I prefer context in art as well. And if there are portraits, I definitely want context (i.e., backgrounds!) there too.

I'd like to repeat how pleasantly surprised I am to not have been pilloried by the community here. That was my first post and I jumped RIGHT into a hotbutton issue (nay, I dragged it in myself) and there were no condemnations, or cries of "troll!" The latter would even have been justified, since I registered then proceeded to make that my first post. Kudos, I'm impressed.

Has anyone ever explored the possibility of software that can read statblocks and convert them to x?

Well for my two cents, I find the whole diversity PC gobbledygook a drag. There were no female knights for a reason (No Joan of Arc was not a knight, she was a General/Holy Symbol/Leader, not a fighter). When I think of a knight, I don't just not think of women, I think "wtf? That's not a knight" when I am shown a woman in a knight's gear.

It's not that I have a problem with women being knights in fantasy, so much as I have a problem with my rightful suspension of disbelief being trampled for PC/feminist/whatever nonsense. For example, say you set up a world where the superpowers of players are explained by their exposure to one or more magic fountains, which grant Bogatyr status; that's cool, and it gives me a good reason to suspend my disbelief - in that case it can make sense for a 110 lb female to have a 20 STR. Conversely, I'm fine with a world where males don't have twice the upper body strength of females, as in our world, where the sexes are built the same and this is reflected in the art. What I'm not fine with is 105 lb hotties in mail bikinis with 20 STR and no explanation.

It's bad enough that the sexes stat out identically (optional rules for the non-PC would be nice) - do we really need to ram this PC stuff down my throat in the art, too?

A couple of stat suggestions based on real life averages, while I'm barbequing sacred cows:

As mentioned above, women have 1/2 the upper body strength of men, and less lower body strength too. Don't know how you'd reflect the bifurcation between upper and lower though.

Women have slightly higher mean IQ than men, but their bell curve is narrower so you have many more men than women at both extremes.

Women have slightly better immune systems.

I'm not as sure about this one, but I think women on average have slightly slower reflexes than men.

Women on average have higher "charisma" (i.e., social skills) than men.

I'm sure there's more (don't get me started on hormones and their effects), but that's all I can recall of the top of my head.