Quote from: pawsplay on February 16, 2024, 02:27:06 AM

With respect to size and upper body strength, you can make a case for some statistics, but the difference in absolute terms (rather than relative statistical ones) is not so great even in the most granular systems (as I gave for some examples above).

Even the most granular systems you've played wouldn't have a mechanical difference between characters that have a 40% difference in ability?

Greetings!

Ahh, yes. More Marxist utopian BS. The sexes are largely interchangeable? *Laughing*

There are two sexes. Male and Female. While there are of course many aspects both sexes have in common--there are HUGE differences in many areas; not merely the massive superiority in strength and power that men have beyond women. Differences psychologically, mentally, emotionally, and more. BIOLOGY controls far more deeper responses and truths than many people realize--or want to admit.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 16, 2024, 03:02:56 AM

Quote from: pawsplay on February 16, 2024, 02:27:06 AMAs for speed, intelligence, etc., men and women are largely interchangeable. At least, it's individual genetics, development and training that matter more. True outliers are outliers by any measure, not just gender.

Utter Marxist drivel.

I'm going to partially disagree only because Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma are so broad and capable of being used for so many different things that trying to say men deserve a positive or negative and women visa versa seems incredibly reductive.

Short version: The idea that women and men are the same mentally IS Marxist drivel. However, the idea that the mental ability scores are fine grained enough to cover those differences is equally drivel (whereas a solid argument could be made for sex-based SKILL modifiers of INT, WIS and CHA-based skills as those are closer to the levels of subdivision needed).

Ex. Charisma applies to both force of personality and softer techniques of persuasion. Men do tend to excel in the former, but to pretend they're as good at the sort of soft power that rears children and tames men into husbands and fathers is similarly silly.

Divide Charisma into a Presence and Manipulation statistic and I could see assigning sex-based bonuses and penalties. But as the glomp stat that is Charisma? It doesn't make sense (whereas men getting a bonus to intimidate and women to deceit would make sense).

The same for Wisdom, which is so ethereal most non-D&D derived systems replace it. It has aspects of spirituality, common sense, observation and willpower all rolled into a huge pile and trying to claim that men or women are exclusively better or worse at all of those things is ridiculous.

Again, if you divided some of those things out you might be able to assign some sex-based modifers (just look at who drives church attendance and it'd make sense for women to have a bonus to a spirituality stat... but not to the whole ball of wax that is the current Wisdom stat (on the other hand, men getting bonuses to perception and women to insight would fall more in line with sex-based cognitive differences).

If Intelligence just covers IQ then yes, there'd be a different curve overall for women and men, but when you throw in other aspects of intelligence it's less clear;

"Women's reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They out­perform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They're more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.

"Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They're better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.

"Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on "dead reckoning": calculating one's position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks."
[/i]

All of those fall under the heading of Intelligence in D&D and adjacent games. If you wish to break Intelligence out into sub-stats then assigning sex-based bonuses and penalties makes sense; but for the broad category it does not (women getting bonuses to Lore/reading-based recall skills and lock-picking while men get bonuses to engineering, puzzle-solving (spatial and working memory juggling) and dead reckoning navigation would make sense).

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 16, 2024, 09:05:18 AM

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 16, 2024, 03:02:56 AM

Quote from: pawsplay on February 16, 2024, 02:27:06 AMAs for speed, intelligence, etc., men and women are largely interchangeable. At least, it's individual genetics, development and training that matter more. True outliers are outliers by any measure, not just gender.

Utter Marxist drivel.

I'm going to partially disagree only because Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma are so broad and capable of being used for so many different things that trying to say men deserve a positive or negative and women visa versa seems incredibly reductive.

While I appreciate your point, I think you're missing something. While you are (commendably) purely focused on the real world translated to D&D stats (the point of the thread,) pawsplay is switching between saying stats aren't granular enough to register differences, and Marxist dogma about IRL men and women being the same.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 16, 2024, 01:28:48 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 16, 2024, 09:05:18 AM
I'm going to partially disagree only because Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma are so broad and capable of being used for so many different things that trying to say men deserve a positive or negative and women visa versa seems incredibly reductive.

While I appreciate your point, I think you're missing something. While you are (commendably) purely focused on the real world translated to D&D stats (the point of the thread,) pawsplay is switching between saying stats aren't granular enough to register differences, and Marxist dogma about IRL men and women being the same.

pawsplay claims that the differences aren't big enough to be represented in game mechanics.

I would say that in a realistic system, the size difference is likely enough to register in the granularity of game mechanics. The strength difference within the same size is less marked but still arguably notable. I've noted the HarnMaster stat modifiers as reasonable. That's for a realistic system, though. In D&D, if halfling are only -1 Strength, then the difference between men and women seems more negligible.

Other proposed stat mods don't seem justified. honeydipperdavid proposed a Dex bonus for women because they can do splits better, but I think that clashes with the game use of Dexterity. Women do tend to have greater joint flexibility from collagen production, but that won't help with armor class or archery accuracy. Similarly, I agree with Chris24601, I don't think mental stats warrant adjustments.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 16, 2024, 01:28:48 PM
While I appreciate your point, I think you're missing something. While you are (commendably) purely focused on the real world translated to D&D stats (the point of the thread,) pawsplay is switching between saying stats aren't granular enough to register differences, and Marxist dogma about IRL men and women being the same.

I didn't miss it (hence my opening statement "The idea that women and men are the same mentally IS Marxist drivel."), I just literally don't care about pawsplay at all.

I DO care that we've got a bunch of folks who seem to be getting tunnel vision in trying to counter pawsplay and falling into just saying things to be contrary to them rather than useful to the discussion and a lot of it seems universally to be "well, women also shouldn't be as intelligent (because there are more male geniuses on the IQ test) and shouldn't have as high a Charisma because men overall have more forceful personalities and maybe even take a ding to Wisdom because Men are better at spatial awareness/working memory problem-solving.

Basically, it starts looking like the "He-Man Woman Haters Club" saying women are inferior at everything simply because that is the easiest counterpoint to Pawsplay's "everyone is the same" argument.

It felt like the nuances were being lost in the rush to prove that someone is "wrong on the internet."

I figured a little reset, particularly on the more ephemeral statistics, would be in order.

I do think, if the ability scores weren't as broad as they are, there could be a real benefit to sex-based score differences; particularly if they were different adjustments for different races to further highlight that, say, elves aren't just humans with pointy ears.

D&D just isn't that system because its not fine-grained enough in the breadth of its attributes (i.e. what each covers; whereas pawsplay was arguing for it being insufficiently fine-grained in the range of scores). I think the closest point to where it would truly make sense in the mental arena would be in the 2e period where they introduced the concept of sub-stats.

With sub-stats you could distinguish between Constitution's damage resistance, stamina, disease resistance, and pain tolerance... or Dexterity's fine-motor control and flexibility from reaction time and spatial skills. You could include differences between presence and manipulation, insight vs. perception, reading and long-term memory vs. speed of calculation in working memory.

But now you're looking at 12+ attributes and, if that worked, we'd still be using the sub-stat system in D&D today.

Quote from: jhkim on February 14, 2024, 09:39:43 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on February 10, 2024, 03:46:55 PM

Quote from: pawsplay on January 23, 2024, 03:42:07 PM
So I looked it up, and in 1988, Florence Griffith-Joyner set a 100m sprint record at 10.49. There is some controversy about the wind reading that day, so the next woman to reach that kind of speed was Elaine Thompson-Herah in 2021 with 10.54. That would put them even with all four men who set a record in 2011-2012 of 10.5 seconds, and ahead of the 10.6 seconds set in 2012 and 2020 that were measured with modern automatic timing.

So, during the 20th century, there is overlap between the fastest 100m woman sprinters and the fastest 100m man sprinters.

She was roided to the gills.

I agree with pawsplay that there is no evidence that Griffith-Joyner used doping. However, the description is a little off. The men's record was under 10 seconds since Jim Hines in 1968, who officially was at 9.95. That was over a half-second faster than Griffith-Joyner in 1988.

There's some debate about how to measure these fractions of a second, along with the issue of wind speed, but it's reasonably clear that men got to below 10.0 seconds before 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression

  There is evidence right in front of you...not likely ever being around any professional athletes I am sure you missed it.  A drug test is an IQ test of your prep team...not a test of if you did or did not use something.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 16, 2024, 02:27:06 AM

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2024, 11:57:00 AM

Quote from: jhkim on February 14, 2024, 09:39:43 PM
I agree with pawsplay that there is no evidence that Griffith-Joyner used doping. However, the description is a little off. The men's record was under 10 seconds since Jim Hines in 1968, who officially was at 9.95. That was over a half-second faster than Griffith-Joyner in 1988.

There's some debate about how to measure these fractions of a second, along with the issue of wind speed, but it's reasonably clear that men got to below 10.0 seconds before 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression

Quote from: pawsplay on February 15, 2024, 10:54:30 AM
Yeah, I already posted the relevant dates, which shows that her record would have beaten the fastest man a number of decades ago in the 20th century (before 1988), certainly through the 1970s. Her trainer attributes this in part to "training like a man" and using nutrition and exercise approaches which are now common but which were then not.

So you're saying that her record in 1988 wasn't faster than the men's record at that time, but it was faster than the men's fastest record in 1920?  I wasn't clear about the phrasing.

If so, I agree, and that goes to Kyle Aaron's point about the importance of training.

Yes, I think so. What I am saying is a woman in recent decades set a record that would have beat the fastest man only a hundred years ago.

This goes back to my central point, that apart from size and upper body lifting, any intrinsic group differences are not as important as individual differences, the kind of individual differences that are usually more important for RPG characters. There is no real difference in possibilities, only in the curve, and those differences vary decade to decade according to circumstances. There aren't any differences there that would preclude a realistic character from having any stat in the general human race. With respect to size and upper body strength, you can make a case for some statistics, but the difference in absolute terms (rather than relative statistical ones) is not so great even in the most granular systems (as I gave for some examples above). I.e. both men and women have demonstrated lifting abilities that would place them at 18/100 or even 19 in AD&D, so saying there are twenty times as many men as women in that category, or whatever, doesn't have much bearing on an individual character.

When you are talking about a distribution, rather than a max, it just doesn't make sense to put your thumb on the scale to get a desired result. Most games don't even measure differences at that level for most statistics. And the presumed "max" just keeps getting broken every few decades, so it's really just another measure of the distribution, not a hard maximum.

As for speed, intelligence, etc., men and women are largely interchangeable. At least, it's individual genetics, development and training that matter more. True outliers are outliers by any measure, not just gender.

  ZERO women hit 18/00 ST...do you not understand what a standing military press is?  And ZERO men are anywhere near 19 ST.  A tiny number of men would be able to pull off 18/00 and if you take away juice...the number is incredibly small.

Quote from: oggsmash on February 20, 2024, 11:27:15 AM
ZERO women hit 18/00 ST...do you not understand what a standing military press is?  And ZERO men are anywhere near 19 ST.  A tiny number of men would be able to pull off 18/00 and if you take away juice...the number is incredibly small.

I literally gave you names. A military standing press is lifting an amount of weight over your head in one motion. That's what the AD&D PHB 2.5 lists for feats of strengths. There are men and women who have exceeded those numbers. Lots of them. So I'm not sure why you are saying zero women have exceeded the weight listed for 18/100, it kind of seems like you are responding without checking anything, or maybe just lying. So as I said earlier, over the head lifting is about the most favorable for men measurement you can take. Men do definitely have larger numbers, but the disparity is not enough to push it outside the ranges found in any RPG I can think of. Literally, women are lifting high four hundreds over their heads without mechanical assistance, which AD&D says is 18/100.

Plus, characters in D&D are pretty much chemically and mechanically assisted. And that's when they are 100% human, which they are not all. IF anything D&D characters would have crazier possibilities than taking steroids.

I guess I may be some Marxist, whatever the fuck that means. But I can definitely say as someone trained to administrate IQ tests, and who has done so in a clinical environment, most of the objections people are making about men and women having the same IQ are not founded in facts. Men and women do have the same IQ. You can get some scatter in some subjects on some tests, but there is no wide agreement between those results when compared to slightly different constructions on other tests. Further, one of the differences cited as huge, visio-spatial stuff, especially rotation of 3d objects, is highly trainable. It reflects intelligence in much the same way as, say, spelling.

I've definitely seen women win in combat LARPS, with no weight or size classes, no gender divisions, where they are out-represented by men 5:1 or more.

Then there's this girl wrestler who beat all the boys. https://tucson.com/sports/high-school/wrestling/audrey-jimenez-state-championship-wrestling-sunnyside/article_4ed93b78-ce33-11ee-bc44-7ba3b7fe8c99.html

Even though men have some statistical advantages, they aren't enough to keep women from winning time to time, and that's the real reason for gender division in sports. Plenty of the business people admitted that more or less openly in the golden age of baseball.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 21, 2024, 09:17:14 PM
A military standing press is lifting an amount of weight over your head in one motion. That's what the AD&D PHB 2.5 lists for feats of strengths. There are men and women who have exceeded those numbers. Lots of them. So I'm not sure why you are saying zero women have exceeded the weight listed for 18/100, it kind of seems like you are responding without checking anything, or maybe just lying. So as I said earlier, over the head lifting is about the most favorable for men measurement you can take. Men do definitely have larger numbers, but the disparity is not enough to push it outside the ranges found in any RPG I can think of.

(emphasis mine)
Male Military Press Standards (lb)
Beginner   69 lb
Novice   101 lb
Intermediate   142 lb
Advanced   189 lb
Elite   241 lb

Female Military Press Standards (lb)
Beginner   31 lb
Novice   50 lb
Intermediate   76 lb
Advanced   106 lb
Elite   140 lb
Source

Alternative Source:
Men's Overhead Press by weight:


Women's Overhead Press by weight:


Even if you take size difference out of the equation, an elite 260 lb woman can be reasonably expected to overhead press 185lbs, compared to an elite man of the same weight lifting 310. That's almost a 60% difference. That's even worse than the 40% I asked you about earlier that you ignored.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 21, 2024, 09:17:14 PM
Literally, women are lifting high four hundreds over their heads without mechanical assistance, which AD&D says is 18/100.

According to the second article above, women's overhead press world record was set by Inez Carrasquillo at 300lbs. So you're literally either making that up or repeating someone else's lies. Unless you have evidence of an unreported world record by a full 33%.

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on February 22, 2024, 02:54:18 AM
Alternative Source:

Apologies, realized too late that I forgot to link the second source. Here you are.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 21, 2024, 09:17:14 PM
Literally, women are lifting high four hundreds over their heads without mechanical assistance, which AD&D says is 18/100.

(emphasis mine)

Also, in regards to the margin I calculated over the existing WR, I failed to notice you claimed not only four hundred but high four hundreds. Being charitable and assuming you mean 460, you're only claiming to have personal knowledge of multiple women exceeding the current record by 53%.

Quote from: pawsplay on February 21, 2024, 09:17:14 PM
I literally gave you names.

Names, dates, and weights would be nice.

Greetings!

"The difference between men and women is negligible to represent in an RPG." Well, in reality, as I mentioned before, the physical differences between men and women's elite accomplishments are HUGE. The best women seem to get around being equivalent to or slightly better than the *average* man. That corresponds with the men's 60% greater muscle mass, twitch responses, endurance, bone density, and explosive power. Also as I mentioned, be sure to watch lots of videos where super elite women get fucking CRUSHED by men. In boxing, wrestling, whatever. The women go down so fucking fast it's funny. Fucking LAUGHABLE. There is no hope, there is no competition. ZERO. Stop fucking copium as weak, pussy Feminists.

Face the deep, harsh truth--Men are far stronger and superior to women.

As for RPG's go, well, as I also mentioned, since it is a fantasy game, I don't usually enforce strict sexual limitations for men and women--because some players really want to play XENA!!! *Laughing* Gabrielle was super popular, too.

HACKMASTER is fucking awesome, too. Of course, I loved the comic series that Hackmaster gained inspiration from.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I hate to agree with paws on anything, but the standards you cite aren't records; they're minimum standards. That's like setting the minimum attribute requirement to qualify for a class, not the maximum.

A related problem with using the military press as the standard is that it ceased being an Olympic event in 1972 (before D&D even came out) because it was deemed too hard to judge if the technique was being done properly.

In this case, I don't disagree that the numbers strongly favor men for Strength, just that by relying on a standard that isn't being as widely used it will be more difficult to find recent real numbers as you would for say, the clean and jerk (which still strongly favors men even in the same weight class, but is a current Olympic event).

It's also worth avoiding the uppermost category for the records which has no upper bound on the lifter's weight. The current women's record holder in the 87+kg range weighs 150kg... so proportionally their 187kg record isn't nearly as impressive as the 81kg women lifter's 161kg lift.

Still, even using the difference between Men and Women in the same weight class the distinction is massive; at that same 81kg class that a woman managed 161kg, the man's record is 209kg or 130% of the women's record in the 81kg class.

In fact, in all the records where men and women shared a weight class, the men's weight exceeded the women's record by about that same margin (the man lifts about 130% of the woman's record).

So even a "size" stat where men get a bonus to it doesn't actually cover the difference. Theoretically a 6'3" 230 lb. woman body builder is STILL only going to lift about 75% as much as a 6'3" 230 lb. male body builder will.

Now how much a difference that makes statistically depends on the system.

In something like Mutants & Masterminds it probably wouldn't because each point of strength is TWICE the previous one (Str 0 is lift 200 lb., 1 is 400 lb., 2 is 800 lb., etc.) so the entirety of the human range is between about -2 and 1.5.

In 3.x D&D every 5 points of Strength doubled your lift, so lifting 130% at the same body mass is probably about a +2 bonus (with an enforced body mass requirement for a given score).

In 4E strength is linear with a carry of Str x 10lb. and lift of Str x 20lb. Which is to say, the modifer for men vs. women would have to scale with whatever the base was (i.e. women take a -1 to Strength per 4 points of Strength they bought).

In 5e the base weights are too ridiculous to even measure as average Strength (10) for the system already lets you carry 150 lb. as if you're unencumbered.

* * * *

So, yes, if you're building a realistic setting a Strength modifier makes sense (its size and whether it should be a bonus for men or a penalty for women or a little of each depends on the system).

But that's just Strength. I'd argue against any mental stat adjustments unless you're radically changing the breadth that Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma cover (each has subsets where men or women excel, but at their current breadth the average favors neither sex).

Dexterity is also a bit too broad; missile fire favors men, but open locks, pick pocket and stealth favor women and AC favors neither (men would be more effective at parrying, women tend to be smaller targets).

Constitution would need to subdivided between stamina (favors men) and pain/disease resistance (women; also, while women will tend to complain about cold before men, they're physiologically better at surviving it than men... the reason they feel cold more easily is because their body is quicker to pull blood/heat to the vital organs to protect a potential child in their womb... which means they survive longer than men*).

Basically, other than Strength the rest of the scores are broad enough that modifers to the whole attribute would be difficult to justify (I've previously listed several skill modifers that would make sense though).

This of course presumes baseline humans in a mundane environment. It's a good reference point to start from, but failing to consider the setting/genre will probably make many elements moot or radically different (ex. the environment is filled with a weave of arcane energy that responds to the will. You are as strong as your psyche believes you should be because of this innate magic... also used to justify why the setting uses point buy instead of random rolls for attributes overall).

* as the joke goes, men dying first is a mercy for them, because when you're both freezing to death, the last thing a husband wants to hear is his wife telling him "I'm cooold!"

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 22, 2024, 08:32:29 AM
I hate to agree with paws on anything, but the standards you cite aren't records; they're minimum standards. That's like setting the minimum attribute requirement to qualify for a class, not the maximum.

I think you're letting paws off way to easliy. His main contention is that the differences between men's and women's lifting are small enough to be washed out in the mechanics of the game. My retort is that that's laughable. The very fact that there are separate categories for men's and women's lifting, and that the numbers are so disparate between, whether they be standards, records, or any other kind of stat.

Secondly, and even more ridiculous, he claims to have knowledge of women exceeding the record I cited by more than half again. Until he either retracts or substatiates that claim I don't see any reason to take anything he says in this thread seriously.

As for any of the differences other than strength, I am ambivalent. There's no good mapping between how we understand inteligence in the real world and how the game abstracts it, and that assumes we have a good understanding of how intelligence works irl, which I doubt anyway.

Quote from: SHARK on February 22, 2024, 08:18:10 AM
Face the deep, harsh truth--Men are far stronger and superior to women.

(emphasis mine)

Careful with that language. So far, paws has been pretty good about merely stating blatant falsehoods, rather than resorting to sladerous ad hominem accusations. He's got questions to answer, don't give him an excuse to deflect them.