Meaning the different genders have different ability score modifiers and possibly other different abilities.
Lashunta are the only Paizo-published race I know of with such a quality.
And only if PF1. For Starfinder they actually retconned it and said that typically brawny form was male and brainy form was female in their past, but that every lashunta could choose at the time of maturation in their modern society.
In short, if you're hoping to see one, I wouldn't hold my breath.
I can't locate it at the moment, but I recall seeing a monster that was described as the son of a hag. If I wasn't imagining it, then the female and male offspring of a hag would be as different as a legal playable race and an unplayable monster can be.
Changlings are always female. I don't believe Paizo has ever published something for male offspring of hags, although I'm fairly certain there's 3.5 content for that as I remember such a character in the old Neverwinter Nights video games.
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Biological determinism has iffy implications for PC appropriate things. Like "you are simply suited to one kind of thing because of a genetic configuration" isn't a fun fantasy to indulge in. I mean, sure male anglerfish get a rough deal just for being born male, but anglerfish aren't people.
Changelings all have female secondary sexual statistics, but that probably has more to do with "hags dispose of whatever children they bear who cannot themselves become hags." No reason you can't have a changeling who is intersex or transgender (or both).
Biological determinism has iffy implications for PC appropriate things.
It's a power fantasy; the whole point is creating characters that do things that are not possible in the real world. Making either gender/sex better-suited to a specific task ultimately undermines one of the central features of the game. There's a very good reason that sort of thing doesn't get published very often.
Changelings all have female secondary sexual statistics, but that probably has more to do with "hags dispose of whatever children they bear who cannot themselves become hags." No reason you can't have a changeling who is intersex or transgender (or both).
"Changelings are always female" are strong words. If a player wanted to play a non-female Changeling I'd say yes, but the flavor-text as written doesn't leave any wiggle-room.
I think it's a pity honestly. In my homebrew setting I made the 3 goblinoids a single sexually dimorphic race, goblins are the kids, hobgoblins the males ans bugbears the females. They get different stats and their society has strong gender roles. I think it can offer interesting narrative elements even without devolving to sexist tropes.
I don't think he (or others) called for humans in PF to be sexually dimorphic, though.
I'll agree with anyone that says that removing the different stats bonuses for male and female human characters was a good thing.
I guess they just didn't want to touch gender issues with 10 foot poles.
After the lashunta discussions, it's pretty unlikely that Paizo will publish another sexually dimorphic player race. And that's fine.
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Lashunta are the only Paizo-published race I know of with such a quality.
I've never heard of them before. I read up a bit on them... it's a pity that the only occasion they touched on sexual dimorphism they basically just enshrined sexist sterotypes on what is otherwise pretty much a human body.
Honestly the premise isn't that far off from racial bonuses in general.
I agree, which is one reason I really like the way the PF2 did stat generation. In particular, that the "Ancestry" step gives you a floating bonus you can put into whatever, including to cancel a penalty. So strong elves, smart dwarves, wise gnomes, or whatever are just a matter of expressing those priorities.
Even if you pick an ancestry with an ability flaw in the thing you want to be best at, that means you start with a 16 an are about one +1 behind for half of a 20 level career.
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Biological determinism has iffy implications for PC appropriate things. Like "you are simply suited to one kind of thing because of a genetic configuration" isn't a fun fantasy to indulge in.
It doesn't quite fit the OP's brief because it's fluff based (and mental dimorphism, not physical) but Starfinder's Akitonian lizardfolk (Ikeshti?) have a pretty creepy level of biological determinism built into their reproductive cycle, with them basically as a rule going into all consuming mating frenzies that invariably end in murdering their mate and undergoing a radical personality shift based on their sex (or turning into a giant monster if they can't find a reproductive partner).
I'm honestly a little surprised that race even exists.
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I can't locate it at the moment, but I recall seeing a monster that was described as the son of a hag. If I wasn't imagining it, then the female and male offspring of a hag would be as different as a legal playable race and an unplayable monster can be.
I suspect that you're thinking of the caliban. ^_^
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I get that some people are queasy when it comes to biological determinism, given historical precedents leading to extremes such as genocides, but as an animal (and plant) breeder myself, it's just a blatant part of nature. For some behavioral traits, a mother and a father can be assessed and quantified, and the result in their offspring can be reliably predicted. Physical traits' inheritance tends to be even more blatant.
A large number of species in the animal kingdom, if not the majority, express sexual dimorphism. One of the most blatant systems is all of the species that use haplodiploidy. Males and females in those cases have different numbers of chromosome sets! And often are hugely different. Often males are just short-lived mating material. In the case of bumble bees, the difference is small. For ants, the males will be winged, unlike the female workers. For honey bees, the males will be much larger, but stingless. Birds are another common examples, males are often smaller and usually have much more colorful plumage, or other mate-attracting trait, such as improved singing. For the American kestrel, the male is smaller and has much more vivid blue colors. The turkey and the peacock have grand tail feathers to show off. As does the rooster, to a lesser extent.
Plus all of the unusual sexual behaviors to be found across the various species. In sea horses, the males get pregnant. In many hymenopteran insects, the fertile female gets mated only at the beginning of her life, and puts sperm in her internal storage to draw upon it through the rest of her life.
I find it unfortunate that the default for races in most fantasy settings is to take a human body, and just add antennae or scales or another cosmetic detail. These aren't actors that we need to put makeup on with a limited budget! We already have humans, why would we need 5 different species of quasi-humans? And why does the only time the concept is explored, it's the enshrine the cliché "brutish dimwit man, sexy strong woman"?
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I find it unfortunate that the default for races in most fantasy settings is to take a human body, and just add antennae or scales or another cosmetic detail. These aren't actors that we need to put makeup on with a limited budget! We already have humans, why would we need 5 different species of quasi-humans? And why does the only time the concept is explored, it's the enshrine the cliché "brutish dimwit man, sexy strong woman"?
I agree with this, but its really hard to come up with alien races that aren't humans with rubber foreheads.
The fact of the matter is that it's really hard to go beyond our ideas and experiences for how other intelligent species should behave, and that's what would make them truly alien. Their physical forms are probably within our imagining. But envisioning truly non-human culture...just doesn't seem to be done.
Almost all the races presented in Starfinder feel like humans who got into a monster costume and agreed to behave in a specific (but human) way.
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To some people, maybe. If I want to play a human, I'll play a human. If I don't want to play a human, I'd much rather play a sentient gelatinous cube than an elf.
Centaur's not really a great example of interesting monstrous race. For one, it's essentially just a dude on a horse. For two, it's got all of the disadvantages of a dude on a horse minus the advantages. Dungeon crawl? Can't dismount. Enlarge Person? Great now a player threatens half the mat. Originality? Zero, it's a frigging man on a frigging horse. Just make a cavalier. I exagerate a bit, but still.
I've had lots of fun with monstrous races. Tiny characters, characters with climb speeds, outsiders, undead, etc.
Some of them had balance issues, but then again most of them were never designed to be players to begin with.
The little rogue spider-dude I had that once? A total blast in dungeon crawls. I would climb on the walls, drop on foes for sneak attacks. Had lots of fun with that, and it did not feel broken to me. Troglodytes with their stench were fun to play as well, that special ability made them a little more than "human with scales". Goblins don't get much that's super special, but still their various perks are interesting, as is their immunity to goblin dog rashes.
If given options to play a viable sentient gelatinous cube, I'd find that pretty interesting concept (though I doubt there's a way to balance that in an interesting manner). I always thought that an undead PC race with rejuvenation would be interesting (other than Lich, which is reserved for spellcasters, and which almost all GMs just bar access to).
It'd be pretty easy to create a race of bird people, where the males are smaller (as in, Small vs Medium size) and get a buff to cha and perform that the females don't have. I don't think that'd really be offensive to anyone. Or bee-people where the female gets a stinger attack, and the male is larger and gets grapple and bull rush bonuses. Or plant-people, where females get sprays and males can create smoke clouds (kinky!). Okay, some of these might be silly, and just ripping off nature and making it anthropomorphic isn't the most original route, but still, it's just a starting point. Hey, just playable plant creatures could be interesting, we don't have any of that. I guess there's a balance concern for sticking to humanoids since many spells can't target non-humanoids.
But those would be interesting. Short long-living human v1 (dwarf), v2 (halfling), and v3 (gnome) are not particularly interesting. Slender human with pointy ears and long living, to me, is not interesting at all. Why are all the quasi-humans super long living, anyways?
Gonna have to add playable sentient gelatinous cube to PF2 feature requests.
edit: I'm not really familiar with oozemorph, but pretty much all the archetypes I've seen that let you turn into something else are utter garbage, like the paladin that turns you into a celestial (he does remember that angelic aspect is on his spell list right?) or the antipaladin that turns you into an undead. They make you trade out so much to gain so little in return.
What I'd like to see (not exactly this but something like it) is a race similar to that described in the book Dragon's Egg. But the problem is that a race of creatures like that, just can't interact in the same way as more traditional humanoid races. So it becomes very hard to run it in a sensible way.
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So I get the appeal of having one kind of person come in a bunch of different flavors, but why do those flavors have to be dependent on sex? We could just as easily make a certain kind of people end up different based on the phase of the moon under which they were born, the season they were born, the environment in which they grew up, "what the sorting hat said" etc.
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On side note, I just learned there IS male equivalent creature to changelings (its apparently called Caliban)
So I get the appeal of having one kind of person come in a bunch of different flavors, but why do those flavors have to be dependent on sex? We could just as easily make a certain kind of people end up different based on the phase of the moon under which they were born, the season they were born, the environment in which they grew up, "what the sorting hat said" etc.
I'd welcome more diverse options, sexually dimorphic or not.
Monstrous races are often much easier to balance when everyone's got something similar. Material about monstrous adventures with alternate sets of playable races, that balance against each other exclusively, might be easier than adding monstrous races and trying to balance them with the core options.
Social shapeshifting humanoids could be interesting, for example. A species that bonds with peers (party mates), and every weak, they adopt the same random mutation. Or maybe they all roll randomly?
A campaign module where the players are ghosts?
I'm up for any diversity.
Honestly, I find it weird that some people can't accept some races have different shapes and abilities based on gender. I mean sure as a human playing a game it can seem sexists, but biologically what a human thinks has no power on what the species does. And as other have said, most species have very different looks and abilities IRL based solely on gender (looks at angler fish where the male is basically a reproductive appendage).
In the case of Lashunta, yeah they are sexually dimorphic, so what? They have a matriarchal society, with females lashunta becoming leaders and commanders, while males are practically soldiers and workers. Now apparently, Starfinder retconned it, to me this means one of 2 things:
1) They have no set gender until they choose, they then keep the gendered form. This means the matriarchs were controlling the gender choice prior to Starfinder.
Or, 2) With Starfinder, they found a way to change the gender while in the early years. So the lashunta in Starfinder need to deal with transgender politics (good and bad).
You're in error here.
You're conflating the dimorphism on the lines of gender, which is how it was presented in Pathfidner. In Starfinder they reveal it was merely a typical choice, and in modern times Lashunta can control whether they become Korasha or Damaya based upon their personal choice. It just happened that in the past they we're basically all forced to choose the stereotypical choice.
They could always be the smart male or the strong female, but in the past they just we're forced to go with the stereotype strong male smart female. The process is kind of like puberty, except it doesn't develop your sexual characteristic, it develops other aspect of your body, like brain development or musculature.
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I don't really have any issues with that. Queen bees and worker bees are genetically the same, their nutrition is what alters them into different castes. High-tech polymorphic societies could find solutions for their members to pick their phenotype, if so they were culturally open to it.
As a pedantic point, it should be noted that (most of) the player races are sexually dimorphic, with different abilities : it's extremely uncommon (I won't say impossible, it's a fantasy game) for "males" to become pregnant and have kids... (It also shows up in the various races height and weight tables, for example Drow females are bigger and heavier than males on average)
Obviously, though, the lack of sexual dimorphism in abilities is not a representation of the real world (otherwise, for example, male humans would be at a significant bonus to strength vs female humans). However, Paizo has clearly chosen to write it that way, to avoid the can of worms of modern gender politics. Fine by me...
One could argue that there are no rules for pregnancy, and thus it doesn't exist in PF. ;)
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I mean "this game has rules for pregnancy, coitus, seduction, etc." might be the biggest and reddest flag imaginable for a tabletop game.
If your group cannot collectively agree on how all of that should work, these things should play no role in your game.
Way back in the primordial 80s Dragon Magazine published an article with rules for mental and physical differences in male and female characters. I don't remember all the changes but one was that females got a +1 to their Constitution because, according to the article's author, women have a higher tolerance to pain because of the ability to give birth. I'm sure that fact was just made up, though.
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Way back in the primordial 80s Dragon Magazine published an article with rules for mental and physical differences in male and female characters. I don't remember all the changes but one was that females got a +1 to their Constitution because, according to the article's author, women have a higher tolerance to pain because of the ability to give birth. I'm sure that fact was just made up, though.
Well "pain" is subjective, so it's very difficult to study but there is empirical evidence that women will nope out of the same painful stimulus later than dudes will. Like they did the "hold your hand in icewater for as long as you can" test on Mythbusters.
While "giving different stat mods to represent differences in biology" would be better if it's a Str vs. Con thing than a Str vs. Cha thing (Cha to represent "Women are attractive? Attractive to whom precisely?"), you would then run into situations where the optimal choice for most characters would be to play a lady character.
I mean, the variance in measurable things within a given gender group i going to be a lot larger than the difference between those groups on average, so it's best to just let the player put their stats wherever they want regardless of sex or gender identity. Characters reliably end up dramatically more competent than realistic people could possibly be, so "realism" shouldn't selectively matter in unfun ways.
You're right on all counts. I've been digging through the .pdfs of my Dragon mags for the article but I've not found it yet. But yes, pain can be subjective. The only possibly "real world" stat change was the -1 to Strength to represent the smaller amount of muscle mass most women have when compared to men.
I also allow players to put their numbers on any ability they want. For instance, I have in one of my games a 13 year old girl who plays a Monk with a 16 STR. It's totally unrealistic but we're going with it because of the rule of cool.
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I also allow players to put their numbers on any ability they want. For instance, I have in one of my games a 13 year old girl who plays a Monk with a 16 STR. It's totally unrealistic but we're going with it because of the rule of cool.
For my last two-handed fighter, I looked at the minimum random stats for humans. Result?
I'm playing a 16 year old human female that measures 4'5", weighs 95lb, and boasts 23 strength (21 before the belt).
Then I crack jokes about people getting beat up by a little girl.
She's also a total bipolar psycho that creeps everyone out.
Lots of fun.
There are also the Ceratoids (sp?), which are anglerfish folks and generally have anglerfish sexual biology, with parasitic males
although neither Formians nor the Anglerfish folk are playable races in Pathfinder.
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I also allow players to put their numbers on any ability they want. For instance, I have in one of my games a 13 year old girl who plays a Monk with a 16 STR. It's totally unrealistic but we're going with it because of the rule of cool.
I dunno, man. There was a girl on our middle school volleyball team who I'm pretty sure could lift the front end of a truck.