[POLL] WOULD IT BE SEXIST TO HAVE DIFFERENT STARTING STATS BASED ON YOUR CHARACTER'S SELECTED GENDER?

A physical difference resulting in... physical differences? Yeah I think a charcter's body the one thing that their sex or race is definitely allowed to affect. Rename intelligence to magic, though.

Yes it would because it doesn't actually make a difference what sex you are, you can be agile or buff or w/e. This isn't dependent on sex. Colette Dowling has written an entire book on this and I'm sure you could find more material in the same vein should you do the research. Just because different bodies pack on obvious muscle doesn't mean they're stronger than a body that has less obvious muscles! In fact, it's often speculated that if an evenly matched man and woman got into a fight, the woman would win, simply because her centre of gravity is lower.

Plus, like, restricting things based on gender in games is no fun anyway! I say do as Skyrim does and stick to giving stat bonuses based on species, but let the player max everything out if they want to. Personally, I love making atypical characters, so a giant orc that's actually a master wizard and total weiner at swordplay would be wonderfully fun.

Just make all your characters look and act like this:



Then nobody can find any faults in what you do.

I will call the police. They will definitely arrest you.

Yes and no. I guess by definition alone some could argue that it is indeed sexist. But I think the implications of the word are too severe for something so trivial at the stats distribution in a game. I would simply call it "tropey", or 'lazy' at worst, but nothing nefarious like that. It would also depend of what kind of game you're aiming for and how flexible the system ends up being; A lighthearted game could easily "get away" (ugh) with this, but If you're aiming for a more serious game, then the more complexity you put into it, the better... And like other have said, as long as you can play as whatever you want and still have the possibility to be good at it, you should be fine. I would see it as challenge to build an Orc mage that can go toe to toe with all other units regardless of class, race or gender.

But don't worry too much about this. When people want an excuse to be mad at something, they'll even get mad at their own shadows.

Think gender roles and think how antiquated they are. Now imagine if I wanted to start a female warrior who's agnostic. Why would I when the male warrior who's Christian would clearly be better in every respect? There's your problem.

Do you really want that on your conscious? "Women can't be warriors, that's silly" is what your game is going to be subconsciously saying. "My religion is better than your religion" is also a silly concept and one that's just going to come across as bigoted regardless of how fanciful your game is.

It's a game; you have every responsibility to make the player chosen character as equal as possible. Things should only change if they decide to be a wizard instead of a warrior and that grants them +15 magic instead of +5 strength (and don't subconsciously make a majority of your wizards women because "women are more suited for the squishy mage jobs").

I played a game that clearly tried to pigeonhole the female protagonist into being a healer (because women are white mages 100% of the time, no exceptions), and I walked out feeling absolutely appalled, despite being a male myself. I'm not going to mention names/point fingers because the last time I did that, I got bashed. Just know that you play as a teenage girl who still has her mother make breakfast for her and who is accompanied by a very-clearly male robot who starts off actually being able to do damage and who also has a fire spell.

author=Corfaisus
Don't you love it when you have a female protagonist that can do literally nothing but die, despite being a fighter? "Now use your skills!" You have no skills. Your robot has a skill and can take more than one hit before dying, but you, the main heroine? Nope. Without a sharp object in your hands, you can't even damage a flower by yourself; a flower. Go back to doing what the other women in this fantasy world are doing: working in the kitchen and knitting sweaters (or take it on the chin by being a squishy healer).

I shouldn't even be the one getting offended. We've got a long way to go.

A helpful quote that followed that by our very own Liberty:

author=Liberty
^Very yes. It's super fucked up. Games like that are annoying. I mean, fair enough if her character is such that she's not a fighter, or that she's been traumatised or her blade is possessed and forces her to fight, but if she's supposed to be an actual real fighter with real skills as a fighter, then she should know how to throw a punch outside of her blade, and still do some damage without it. Hell, I'm not a fighter of any kind and I know how to fucking throw a punch!

I'm like, 50/50 with you there, Feldschlacht. Averages can't be safely applied to a particular individual, y'know? While men might have more average muscle mass than women, that doesn't change the fact that a woman who works out every day and is 6 feet could probably take out a guy who's 5'4 and is fairly sedentary - and it's also pretty likely that that's the same type of woman who would become a berserker or fighter instead of a mage (biology be damned) - in which case, their class should probably affect their base stats, not their gender.

The other half of that - writing stories and plots that involve gender - involves what your game is trying to do. If you're trying to build a "realistic world" - that is, as realistic as a postnuclear apocalypse gets - then yea, a gender-centric storyline might make sense. However, now you're delving into territory of "I better know what the hell I'm doing or find someone who does" and you better make sure that whatever "world-building" you're doing is worth the cost - in Fallout's case, is restricting female characters' access to a quest worth it? I know it'd be frustrating to find out I couldn't see parts of the game because I wanted to play a girl. On the other side of the coin, in some cases it makes more sense - restricting who you can hook up with in Dragon Age, for example, based on the NPC's sexual orientation - feels a little less frustrating. In general, that's the kind of area I'd wanna be very careful with.

The above doesn't apply to a lot of games, though - in a heavily stat-based (and often story-light) genre like a roguelike, changing my characters' stats due to their gender doesn't serve a strong world-building purpose, and just serves to give people a false customization option (Pick whatever gender you want! But not the sub-optimal one). It's frustrating and doesn't benefit the game design.

That said, I like LockeZ's idea of picking a zodiac or elemental affinity for stat growth - plus, that gives you way more freedom for stat-customizing than just a male/female gender choice.

Depends on what you're putting the gender choice in for in the first place.

If the whole point of character building is mechanical, so the only reason a player would have to make, say, an orc mage, is to give their character the gameplay characteristics of the "orc" and "mage" templates, then I guess the implications might bother some people, but you're not really shoehorning anyone into story-based decisions they don't want for mechanical reasons. If the choices are driving elements of the story though, you don't want to force the player's hand on them.

Personally, I prefer just using casts of fully unique predesigned characters. If your party contains a highly accomplished swordswoman, would she be stronger if she had instead been a swordsman? Maybe, but it's a kind of meaningless hypothetical because you can't just have someone grow up a different gender from birth and be remotely the same person, and there was never a male version of her who could have joined your party in the first place.

Well I'd say that from a gameplay perspective rather than a sexist perspective, people don't normally associate gender choice with something that would affect their stats, so unless that is completely clear, I'd steer away from that line of thinking.

author=Feldschlacht IV
To be clear though; gender bases stat choices is contentious, because besides for stats that might contribute to Strength and Defense weighted towards dudes (and only in the real world), you get into weird realms of thoughts like stats like Intelligence being gender weighted, which is...controversial.

There's a whole host of reasons why I prefer to avoid linking magic ability to "intelligence." At least in some Western RPGs it comes with associated changes in roleplaying options, but when it has nothing to do with how the characters behave, it's just all kinds of nonsensical, and considering how easy it is to avoid that by just changing the name of the stat, I feel like there's really no excuse.