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xalabin

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I have some doubts here:

  • Human sexual dimorphism: females have -2 STR ¿Why not +2 CON (they have more life expectancy)? Or maybe +1 CON +1 DEX Not only for have a realistic environment just for don't made female characters unattractives.
  • I have the feeling that there is no much difference between one vanilla barbarian bard and another vanilla barbarian bard, ok, you have diferent motivations and diferent characteristics but finally have basically the same points on the skills and basically the same traits. As sugestion you need to expand the choices on the traits o increase the pool of points to distribute.
  • There is a lack of rules for create younger or older characters.

 

 

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1 hour ago, xalabin said:

 

  • Human sexual dimorphism: females have -2 STR ¿Why not +2 CON (they have more life expectancy)? Or maybe +1 CON +1 DEX Not only for have a realistic environment just for don't made female characters unattractives.

 

 

or +1 INT : since women cannot use their muscles as much as men, they have to use their brain instead, more often than the testosteroned men and are therefore more experienced in this.:P

Wind on the Steppes, role playing among the steppe Nomads. The  running campaign and the blog

 

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Oh, some comments at last.

Dimorphism: there will be no rules to enforce character "balance", as is traditional for D100 games. If you want to use the -2 for feminine STR, there is no counterpart for it. You have the choice of ignoring or applying the modifier as desired (see Baulderstone aoove).

Younger/Older characters: noted, a table will be in the next version. But basically it boils down to +25% to skills and +3 Traits per "step". Younger characters might get no skill increases, just Traits, and lose the Traits they do not have the slots for.

Choices: assuming you choose to add a characteristic you have at 15, you have 15 points out of 40 that you attribute at will (37%). At least 20% of your non-cultural traits are chosen freely by the player. Adding a wider range of choices might let you end up with a Barbarian Bard with unplausible skills rather than add variability .

As a counter-proof, we might build two characters with the same culture/profession pair and see if they end up the same. Did anyone try?

Edited by RosenMcStern

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Let's try it. I'll make a bard, somebody makes his one and we compare. BTW, the bard is limited to "barbarian, human". Bards should be available to almost any culture in different forms (celtic bard, germanic skald, greek poet, medieval troubadour, nomadic manashi, modern pop singer...).

BTW again, in the profession table, "culture" column, I think there is a confusion between species (human, dwarf...) and culture (barbarian, nomad etc...), even if you actually mean "human" = "human of the kingdom of [...]" etc. This corresponds to "civilized" in many rpg, but this is a bit contempting for the barbarians and nomads.

Do you intend to have modern or sci-fi professions in the core rules, since there is the according equipment ?

Wind on the Steppes, role playing among the steppe Nomads. The  running campaign and the blog

 

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The ambiguity between race and culture is intentional.

Professions should be something that comes with the setting. The examples given are just this, an example that lets you understand "how to make a dwarf character", "how to make a barbarian", etc. It cannot be fully genericised, and I am unsure whether this kind of information should be in the core book. Maybe 2-3 separate, and short, series of profession tables for the various genres in order to allow a "quick start" for people who do not want to make up their own setting at first.

 

 

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OK. I think at least a few classical stereotyped characters shall be in the core book.

My bard is ready, I'll send it to you per email with some comments in order not to influence anybody. The charater creation using the quick characteristic is really amazingly fast !

Wind on the Steppes, role playing among the steppe Nomads. The  running campaign and the blog

 

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26 minutes ago, RosenMcStern said:

The ambiguity between race and culture is intentional.

Professions should be something that comes with the setting. The examples given are just this, an example that lets you understand "how to make a dwarf character", "how to make a barbarian", etc. It cannot be fully genericised, and I am unsure whether this kind of information should be in the core book. Maybe 2-3 separate, and short, series of profession tables for the various genres in order to allow a "quick start" for people who do not want to make up their own setting at first.

 

 

I have not seen the book, so I apologize if this is covered or would just not work at all.  If you are doing a generic kind of build to support multiple settings, couldn't you try "This is the traditional "human" from d100. This is the baseline, now let me give you three examples of other potential character races, based off that mode." And do the same with Culture and Professions. I would not even get as detailed down the "barbarian" or "nomad" etc...  I guess I am saying, instead of standard character creation, you give people the ability to construct their own everything.  When trying to be generic and broad, I would think a less is more / austere design is going to work better. Again though, I have not seen it and this could be very well what you are doing.

That said, the sexual dimorphism makes less sense in any case. I am not going to beat the dead horse, but if you have a rule that "people can take or leave" (true of all rules) then its not much of a rule, is it? In a more generic game design, this could be an option for building alien or hominid species. It could even be worded as "In some species there is a difference in the sexes. In some hominids and primates, the male has an advantage in strength. In some arachnids, the female is larger (SIZ) and generally the more aggressive sex."  That gives solid examples without it sounding like "Women are weaker than men". 
 

Edited by ReignDragonSMH

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43 minutes ago, ReignDragonSMH said:

That said, the sexual dimorphism makes less sense in any case. I am not going to beat the dead horse, but if you have a rule that "people can take or leave" (true of all rules) then its not much of a rule, is it? In a more generic game design, this could be an option for building alien or hominid species. It could even be worded as "In some species there is a difference in the sexes. In some hominids and primates, the male has an advantage in strength. In some arachnids, the female is larger (SIZ) and generally the more aggressive sex."  That gives solid examples without it sounding like "Women are weaker than men". 
 

I agree. I've had a problem with the sexual dimorphism rules, and thought they had been removed at my suggestion.

The idea that men are generally stronger than women isn't actually backed up by science, and is one of those cultural things that everyone assumes is true but isn't. While it is true that individual men can be stronger than individual women, that works both ways; individual women are stronger than individual men.

And inclusion rules that say otherwise is a big, flashing neon sign that says "this game isn't for women".

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And in fact I thought I had removed them.

In any case, either they stay as a "this cannot be enforced as a limit to female PCs", or they go altogether (which sounds as the less divisive option). There will be no balance to persuade the player of a female PC to make her weaker in exchange for increased DEX or INT. Either you do it as a trait you want to play, or you ignore it.

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16 minutes ago, RosenMcStern said:

And in fact I thought I had removed them.

In any case, either they stay as a "this cannot be enforced as a limit to female PCs", or they go altogether (which sounds as the less divisive option). There will be no balance to persuade the player of a female PC to make her weaker in exchange for increased DEX or INT. Either you do it as a trait you want to play, or you ignore it.

I totally agree with the no balance thing. It just makes it even more messy and wouldn't make sense for say a race based off black widow spiders where (in this instance) the female is much larger than the male. 

Its 2300hrs, do you know where your super dreadnoughts are?

http://reigndragonpressblog.blogspot.com/

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3 hours ago, Charles Green said:

The idea that men are generally stronger than women isn't actually backed up by science, and is one of those cultural things that everyone assumes is true but isn't.

:huh:. I won't argue on this, although I completely disagree, but in general, too much politically correctness is not only arguable, but can kill creativity. For example, any list of Traits or features for a specific culture could be interpreted as a prejudice (I must admit it is difficult to find any prejudice of this kind in the core rules). So we shall stop somewhere.

 

3 hours ago, Charles Green said:

And inclusion rules that say otherwise is a big, flashing neon sign that says "this game isn't for women".

This is a more relevant question : does a rule bring something to the game, and what. In our current example of dimorphism, if this is "a cultural thing that everyone assumes is true", no woman, who belong to the "everyone", shall be upset because of such a rule. But do we need it anyway in game and MGF terms ?

That said, I don't care for this dimorphism rule.

Wind on the Steppes, role playing among the steppe Nomads. The  running campaign and the blog

 

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14 hours ago, Zit said:

That said, I don't care for this dimorphism rule.

Neither do I. But, please, take it away because it has a lot of potential for contentiousness without adding anything fun or essential. I don't want Revolution to become known as "that game where women are weaker".

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On 11/27/2015, 10:18:44, xalabin said:

 

  • I have the feeling that there is no much difference between one vanilla barbarian bard and another vanilla barbarian bard, ok, you have diferent motivations and diferent characteristics but finally have basically the same points on the skills and basically the same traits. As sugestion you need to expand the choices on the traits o increase the pool of points to distribute.

 

It's a problem with writing stats for the different types of bardish professions in Merrie England - Minstrels, Trouveres and Troubadours are subtly different, yet are all similar to the bard. I juggle with the skill allocations and change the traits somewhat, but they are very similar professions.

When creating a character, the differences come in what traits and stunts to take as well as how you apply the extra points and characteristic points to skills.

  • There is a lack of rules for create younger or older characters.

 

Merrie England has some tweaks to create characters of different degrees of experience. Whether Paulo wants to keep them in or not hasn't been decided, as he has neither seen them nor heard about them yet. ;)

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

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1 hour ago, soltakss said:

 

It's a problem with writing stats for the different types of bardish professions in Merrie England - Minstrels, Trouveres and Troubadours are subtly different, yet are all similar to the bard. I juggle with the skill allocations and change the traits somewhat, but they are very similar professions.

 

Rules cannot solve everything, role playing and background help.

Regarding troubadours, as far as I know, it designs someone, male or female (trobaritz), who composes -or knows how to compose- poems in the Occitan language. He must not be an interpret. Many nobles were troubadours (ex.: Guilhem, Comte of Poitou and Duc of Aquitaine, or even Richard Lionheart, even if not among the most famous ones), and actually the very first ones where probably nobles. This concerns of course people who has been at least raised in Occitania, probably not in England. So you can make your troubadours very different from minstrels!

You may like to write it "trobador", as in the Occitan language.

Wind on the Steppes, role playing among the steppe Nomads. The  running campaign and the blog

 

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4 hours ago, smiorgan said:

Neither do I. But, please, take it away because it has a lot of potential for contentiousness without adding anything fun or essential. I don't want Revolution to become known as "that game where women are weaker".

It will certainly guarantee that you will never, ever be able to have a civil discussion of any aspect of the game on rpg.net. 

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1 hour ago, Baulderstone said:

It will certainly guarantee that you will never, ever be able to have a civil discussion of any aspect of the game on rpg.net. 

This fact alone would make me incline to keep the rule in ;)

In any case, Alephtar Games has a clear and established policy about "potentially contentious" subjects. Basically, the approach is that we take things in their historical (or scientific in this case) context. Once you have "objectified" the point, it becomes less dangerous as a source of dispute. In "Rome", for instance, the rules said clearly that female player characters would be problematic if strict historical accuracy was desired, as women had objective limits to their freedom of action in the City. After which we added that no one required the group  to play "historically" after all, and thus each group was free to have female PCs without historical limitations. However, this did not mean that we would "rewrite history" for the sake of political correctness: the historical facts were clearly exposed.

It is also important to note that providing correct information about potentially dangerous subjects helps the group to avoid those dangers in play.

Putting a rule about different STR for males or females in the character creation chapter, on the other hand, is in fact an invitation to open an argument. Which means that it will be removed.

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5 hours ago, Zit said:

Rules cannot solve everything, role playing and background help.

Regarding troubadours, as far as I know, it designs someone, male or female (trobaritz), who composes -or knows how to compose- poems in the Occitan language. He must not be an interpret. Many nobles were troubadours (ex.: Guilhem, Comte of Poitou and Duc of Aquitaine, or even Richard Lionheart, even if not among the most famous ones), and actually the very first ones where probably nobles. This concerns of course people who has been at least raised in Occitania, probably not in England. So you can make your troubadours very different from minstrels!

You may like to write it "trobador", as in the Occitan language.

Indeed, that is pretty much how they are treated in Merrie England.

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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Wow the topic has grow up this weekend!

Thanks for the answers.
I will try to create a celtic bard this week (not promise) i know that it's my first impression after read it and i don't create noone PC (after all, english isn't my first language and i wanted to read all sections first)

About sexual dismorfism it isn't god or bad itself, simply opens a dor to easy discussions (mens are xxx, women are zzz) and i think that adventurers are significatively out of common people for lost time in that but everyone is free to play how it likes :-D

Altough on historical games i generally ask my group and if someone disagrees made the environment more gender equallity. That isn't more disruptive than adds magic.
A little reflexion, if you have magic and you have a common cure disease spell all the world changes, think about it, "antiobiotics" whit ancient agricultural production and technollogy. Less baby deaths, more population... Or you limit that spell or you have a world always starved.

Edited by xalabin
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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 6 months later...

Gender differences are a hot-button topic, so I'll make this clear:

Actually causing stats or skills to be better or worse based on Gender isn't actually realistic. The primary (and often only) difference between a man and a woman attempting something is not the efficiency of a tasks completion or how well it was done, but the method that makes that task easiest to them. There are even real world exceptions to this rule of thumb, and most of the females that could be considered exceptions are the type of woman you'd expect to be adventuring in the first place.

 

Ultimately, this seems like the only proper way to add a guide to these differences:


1: The GM would be advised that forcing player characters to use the data provided would be both unrealistic and extremely prone to splitting the group at the seams.

2: Data provided would be non-mechanical, and focus on strengths of each gender rather than weaknesses, as well as pointing out the utility of each "Strength" in a manner that shows no preference for either. If Data on this would reinforce any negative stereotype, it is omitted for the sake of preventing problems.

3: Each strength pointed out should result in, at most, a "preferred" or "New" way to use the skill it effects. Example: A focus on Upper Body Strength (Men) or Lower Body Strength (Women), differences in how each gender solves the same problems logically with similar effectiveness, and Stunts that rely on the strengths common to that gender (Spot Details for women, Notice in Low Light for men). The utility of these should be equivalent to that of their counterpart of the opposite gender.

4: This should go without saying, but pointing out strengths that paint a negative picture of either gender isn't a good idea. For example, you shouldn't have a female character with the specialization in "Streetwise" of "Gossip", because it paints a very negative picture of women, just the same as a man shouldn't have a "Stealth" specialization for "Peeping Tom" for the same reason. Obviously, depending on background this could be waived, but the source of these should NEVER be just the gender of the character, and the group needs to be okay with a character with these flaws as focuses for skills. If the group's majority votes no (with the GM's vote counted a second time if a tie happens), this is a perfectly good reason for you being ejected from that group, especially if you've already been warned about it.

5: I shouldn't have to say this, but SHOW YOUR WORK. Any research that points to the advantages of either gender in a certain way should be mentioned with other research materials in a bibliography at the back of the book, that has an entry in the table of contents. It's a lot easier to justify adding gender differences even as an optional rule if you have research you can point to from credible sources that confirms the differences in the system. Likewise, emphasize that these rules are not "Hardwired" into the game, and can be ignored if they would cause arguments... And once again, that the GM shouldn't force players to use any of the suggestions offered, but depending on the group may have the right to forbid use of the suggestions given on the basis of gender alone.


My Rationale is:


1: Men and women are largely capable of the same accomplishments given the proper training and opportunity; However, scientific data suggests that due to the differences between men and women (both body and mind) it is often easier easier to be good at a task using different methods of accomplishing it by each gender for the majority of either. I say "Majority" because there are exceptions in real life too, and while not extremely common, they are more common than you think (Also, the most likely to act contrary to traditional roles, which is why most female adventurers aren't normal according to the society which they came from).

2: By focusing on the strengths of each AND making including them all optional, suggested skill foci that affect the method (rather than the effectiveness) of skill uses in ways equivalent in utility and accessibility, You are avoiding painting any single gender as "superior" or "inferior" to it's counterpart.

3: By not mentioning perceived or believed strengths that violate religious or secular morality to either gender on sole basis of that gender, you avoid validating negative stereotypes about that gender. By not touching the stats or skills themselves beyond suggesting a single focus for them (Taken out of the number able to be chosen normally), you are reinforcing the idea of "Different Yet Equal" that is key to dismantling prejudice of any kind (though in this instance, it's sexism in particular)

4A: The above three principles allow for strong female characters that aren't evocative of tomboys specifically, but reinforce the ability of a properly written female protagonist of any profession in particular to be both strong AND feminine, without resorting to making them "Men at heart" (One of the few ways strong female characters are portrayed in Hollywood, the other being as a villain or with partial nudity). The fact they're optional allows players to make the kind of exceptions to societal roles and physiological traits that do exist in the real world among females. And the fact that EACH element is optional means you can pick exactly where on the spectrum of masculine/feminine nature a female character falls in method and behavior without forcing penalties on the character.

4B: Likewise, principles 1-3 allow the creation of sensitive male heroes without forcing them to mirror negative stereotypes about such things, while allowing the "masculine and tough" males common in fiction and present in real life to be properly represented as well. Again, this also allows you to pick where on the "Masculine/Feminine" spectrum of behavior and modus operendi any male character falls into without forcing penalties to be applied to the character.

5: By not tying stats to gender at all, quite a few other problems are avoided entirely, leaving it much easier to explain the differences without showing prejudice that may or may not exist within you. By not reducing skills, you likewise are avoiding "Go Back to the Kitchen" syndrome.

6: By not outright suggesting foci for specific skills, but instead giving the information to the player without tying it to any direct mechanical choice at character creation, the player will fill in the blanks themselves, creating a greater diversity of characters of both genders. 

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