[The Last Conformist]

Originally Posted by The Metal Pope

Is it really any worse, though, to raise or elevate a woman's characteristics where they maybe shouldn't than not do it? Here's the thing, people: women and men ARE different!!!!! Why shouldn't games reflect that fact? Because you want to be politically correct? That's just one of the reasons why so many Europeans laugh at Americans - I'm Belgian, and I love the States. I visit every year, but sometimes the focus on having to be politically correct in some areas just is plein weird and unrealistic.

The only problem here is that the stat increases/decreases don't all reflect reality... But NOT having gender adjustments is even less realistic!!!!!!

The problem here is that gender differences between men and women in strength, endurance, etc are differences in average. If chargen was supposed to come up with an unbiased sample of a population I'd agree with giving female characters lower Strength than male ones. However, very few RPGs deal with average people, and Fantasy Imperium isn't one of them. It deals with a priori exceptional people, heroes. Why shouldn't a player then be allowed to play the one woman out of a million who can go toe-to-toe with the lumberjacks, strengthwise? If the player wants a woman with a more typically feminine strength score, he or she can still have that.



(As an aside, I don't think Europeans are less politically correct than Americans, not to any significant degree. It's just that we're politically correct about a partially different set of issues; some things that aren't acceptable here are there, and vice versa.)