Age of Heroes Moving
Brian Gleichman
switch. Note the new email and web address below.
In addition to perhaps gaining a better than 70% uptime on my account, this
will provide me with enough web space to expand beyond what anyone thinks is
reasonable (given the lack of comments I've received and a proper assumption
of silence = bad).
--
Brian Gleichman
glei...@mindspring.com
Age of Heroes: http://gleichman.home.mindspring.com/
Psychohist
bearing with me with the email attachments, Brian.
I've only looked it over so far, rather than reading it, so I only have first
impressions.
One of the first is that it reminds me a lot of the original C&S. It's not
just the bulk and two column format; it's also the prevalence of charts and
such.
I suspect that there has been significant rules accretion over the years,
particularly in the early years. For example, the characteristics section
makes me suspect that you started with a 2D6 system, then went to a percentile
based table to differentiate player characters and NPCs. Yes/no?
It seems like it would be difficult to learn other than in play, as there is so
much to digest. I skipped to the combat section, and immediately ran into
references to movement allowance; I remembered seeing that when skimming the
first section, but I wasn't looking carefully enough to know if a typical MA
was, say, 3 or 10. I suspect there are a lot of references like this. Not a
problem, necessarily; just a lot to absorb.
Is there a summary sheet that players refer to? Did I miss it in my first
leafing through the rules?
I'll give more comments when I've actually read through more of the rules.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
news:19990722224042...@ng-cg1.aol.com...
> I suspect that there has been significant rules accretion over the years,
> particularly in the early years.
There is some of this. The main work was done over a few years and there's
been two occasions of rather significant additions since then.
> For example, the characteristics section
> makes me suspect that you started with a 2D6 system, then went to a
percentile
> based table to differentiate player characters and NPCs. Yes/no?
In a way.
I settled first on a 11 point characteristic spread because it gave me the
enough of a range for my tastes. Five positive and five negative levels.
Keeps things from being too grainy, but doesn't over do it. As a result I
settled on 2d6.
I always wanted have a notable difference between the PC (and important NPC)
and the common crowd. Otherwise I would have named the game Age of the
Common Man. So there was always going to be two rolling methods.
I started playing with different ways of rolling 2d6 (roll 3d6 and toss the
low dice for example). As I started to determine the probabilities, I said
the heck with it and did the percentile table instead. That way I got the
exact numbers I wanted without any effort.
I used the percentile for both types of characters so that the method would
be the same.
So, the table was always there. But yes, it did grow out of 2d6 modified for
heroes.
> It seems like it would be difficult to learn other than in play, as there
is so
> much to digest.
Very true I'm afraid. Of course learning in play has been the only method up
to now.
One of my goals here is to get enough feedback that I make things clearer
for those who don't have the option of learn by play.
> I skipped to the combat section
You do that too! I always skip to the combat section.
> and immediately ran into
> references to movement allowance; I remembered seeing that when skimming
the
> first section, but I wasn't looking carefully enough to know if a typical
MA
> was, say, 3 or 10.
The typical MR depends on your race. It's a six for humans. The basic book
doesn't go into race much as nearly every world would have different
entries. Those are in my campaign supplement but examples are given in the
core rules.
> Is there a summary sheet that players refer to? Did I miss it in my first
> leafing through the rules?
Sadly no. It might be interesting to try to put one together, although I'm
not sure what its form or contents should be.
There is the rather extensive table of contents. And when I'm done I may put
in an Index.
Psychohist
1. I think the main reason you haven't been getting many comments is because
of the PDF format. People with slow connections begrudge the time to download
the latest reader, and reading it on screen is inconvenient, since one can't
get a full page on a typical screen without making the font illegible.
Me, I'm printing it out (which is why I've only skimmed book 1 so far -
printing from the PDF reader is memory and CPU intensive). It does look really
spiffy once printed.
I know this shouldn't matter, but you did seem a little disappointed at the
lack of comment.
2. General comment - there are a lot of rules, and perhaps more importantly,
you really have to go through all of them to understand the system. I think
this would make it more difficult to learn than systems where, say, the core
rules are about 10% of the text, and you can start playing without having even
looked at the other 90%.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; the less modular nature of the rules may
make them richer to players that use them all.
3. From a simulationist standpoint, I keep finding little things that don't
look quite right, generally resulting from extremes being too common. For
example, a full 1% of the population has a personal appearance over which "wars
have been waged", "kingdoms destroyed", and "legends made"? There must be a
lot of wars....
(Though it's still better than C&S, which put 5% of the population in that
category.)
4. From my standpoint, it seems to have a lot of special cases - there must be
an average of two or three charts per page. Do the players memorize the
important ones, or do people often refer to the rules?
At least each individual chart is clear (unlike Rolemaster), and all the
special cases are pretty easily found through the table of contents (unlike
Storyteller).
5. The character advancement system looks really original, and seems like it
would do a very good job of capturing the desired flavor of the target genre
(Tolkein).
If I may say so, though, this part of the rules seems more dramatist than
gamist?
6. Another general comment: clear prose, well presented visually. I almost
forgot to mention this, since it should be true of all rules sets ... but then
I remembered that in actuality, it's true of very few.
Now on to books 2 and 3.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> 1. I think the main reason you haven't been getting many comments is
because
> of the PDF format.
You may well be right. This was very much a case of choosing the best of the
worst.
In the end I decided to go with the one best suited to printing (i.e. it
would keep the format no matter the system it is printed on). I needed to
print my copy out, and figured that anyone serious about learning the rules
would need to as well.
Acrobat is made for postscript, it works great there. Less efficient
anywhere else (it takes forever on an inkjet, but inkjets just take forever
anyway).
Boudewijn says that he has some PDF to HTML conversion utilities he's going
to try. That might be interesting although I think the format will go to
hell...
I can't imagine reading these rules on the screen in HTML. It will be
interesting to see what his results are.
> 2. General comment - there are a lot of rules, and perhaps more
importantly,
> you really have to go through all of them to understand the system.
Yes. Lots of rules, many interlinked. I tried to always refer back to
relevant sections when needed.
I imagine that this is also responsible for the lack of comments. One does
have to read everything (at least until you get to Book 3) and I imagine few
would have the interest.
People expect core rules to be contained within a handful of pages these
days.
> 3. From a simulationist standpoint, I keep finding little things that
don't
> look quite right, generally resulting from extremes being too common.
:)
I knew you would find those.
The ranges for Height and Weight, percentage of population with specific
stats and the like are all off.
One of the reasons for this is the focus on heroic characters and those that
surround them. The unrealistic ranges help to add variety and interest. In
general we're talking about a limited sample range (PCs and detailed NPCs)
and realistic tables would result in a rather bland area for our heroes to
play in.
Another reason is that it is just plain hard to do realistic tables for such
things.
I will however have to say I do better than many other games...
One more comment specifically about the NPC characteristics table, most NPCs
you encounter in our games don't have a detailed write-up and are assumed to
have stats ranging from 6-8. These make up by far most of the NPCs you will
come across. Add this factor in and you get a better distribution.
Those that attract attention (get a full write-up) must be unusual in same
way (or else they'd fade into the background like the rest of the masses),
so I don't feel too bad in giving them a greater range for their
characteristics.
And in the case of the War Starting PA, let's just say I wouldn't assign to
12 to a NPC's PA unless I wanted to cause a stir. It would likely find it's
way to another characteristic.
> 4. From my standpoint, it seems to have a lot of special cases - there
must be
> an average of two or three charts per page. Do the players memorize the
> important ones, or do people often refer to the rules?
The tables used for character creation don't see much use thereafter, so
they tend to be the rarer lookups.
Besides, the character sheet condenses many of the tables into it. We use a
spreadsheet and it is possible for a player to generate a character from it
without every touching the rule book (after generating the basic ten
characteristics)
The combat tables are heavily used. The skill tables less so.
I need to put a tri-fold of the combat tables together in a PDF and add it
to the web site. The order in the rules are fine for explanation, not so hot
for actual use (page flipping). We printed out the pages and did real life
cutting and pasting to create a good GM tri-fold for our own use.
People have memorized tables important to them and I certainly have
memorized many of the combat ones. Believe it or not I had the hit location
table down pat at one point (I don't run my game enough these days to have
kept that, but it could come back fast if I went to weekly games again).
But yes, there is a good deal of lookups at times. Players love to have
their own copy of the rules. It has never taken a great deal of time to find
any specific reference, but it could cause problems for those who hate
looking for rules under the best of conditions.
> 5. The character advancement system looks really original, and seems like
it
> would do a very good job of capturing the desired flavor of the target
genre
> (Tolkein).
>
> If I may say so, though, this part of the rules seems more dramatist than
> gamist?
It has influences from all three corners.
From the Sim side it obvious that people tend to peak at their professions.
Moreover, they peak at different levels. Games tend to let everyone advance
without end. This always struck me as unrealistic, so I wanted a method to
determine a character's peak ability.
The Drama side gave me the answer. If we were going to do a game about
heroes, than the peak ability of that hero should depend on how heroic he
has been. What could be easier.
It also matched very well indeed with the source works. Groups in high
fantasy aren't all equal level characters. The Fellowship varied widely and
one finds this to be a general rule.
The Gamist side was quite happy with this. It tied advancement directly to
player effort and risk. No more would simply showing up for a game be reason
enough to ascend to the heights of power. If your character is a hero, it's
because he was heroic.
In addition the Gamist finds joy in dealing with the resulting levels of
strength within your party. The class system makes it likely that even a
fourth level may exceed even a 10th in areas. This means that one must
balance your approach to problems a bit more carefully.
I put a lot of work in making sure that the advancement system allowed
characters of different levels to adventure together. My last trip to KC saw
a party ranging from fourth to tenth level.
And lastly, it's the core part of the system that allows Generational
Campaigns. I don't know if one should call that a Gamist or Dramatist
concern.
Brian Gleichman
news:7nf5eu$8i$1...@essle.valdyas.org...
> it should be easy enough to make two formats available: one printed to
> pdf, one saved as HTML.
Hardly easy.
Saving Age of Heroes to HTML produces one long page without any hyperlinks.
I'd have to go in and add them.
Ideally I'd also want to break it up into browser friendly pages (it's 2.5
megs worth of HTML presently).
And then when I change or add something, I'd have to do it twice or repeat
the above process. I've already had to put an errata page on the web site
since I'm dumb and forget to make long planned changes. If I get any
feedback, I might well have to do more to fix and clarify things.
Lastly, offering both at the web site takes up room I'd like to use for more
stuff. Lot's of room unless I want to zip the HTML and make it download
only.
> The acrobat reader 4.0 takes 36 mb of memory, meaning
> that it is anything but easy to use on my 64 mb system.
36!? It uses less than 16 on mine.
> it's also difficult
> to read straight through, on screen, while the cross-referencing html
> offers should be great for a large system like Age of Heroes.
I'd have a difficult time reading anything of that length on the screen- PDF
or HTML. I like paper.
The cross-referencing is neat however.
> I'm not too keen on the format, I dislike the traditional two-
> column large format for roleplaying games intensely. I'd like to
> see rolelplaying games take a cue from, say, O'Reilly, and use
> a smaller format and a single-column layout, perhaps
> with a sidebar for chatty notes.
Wow, that would drive me crazy. Just goes to show how different people are.
I think it's due to you being so browser centric. There it makes sense as
the single column prevents scrolling.
The duel column format on the printed page is much easier on the eyes in
addition to allowing for more organization per page with column breaks.
--
Right now I'd like to spend my time writing up more stuff rather than
presenting the same things in different formats. The present method is just
faster.
Maybe later.
Boudewijn Rempt
> Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:19990724184400...@ng-fi1.aol.com...
>
>> 1. I think the main reason you haven't been getting many comments is
> because
>> of the PDF format.
>
> You may well be right. This was very much a case of choosing the best of the
> worst.
>
> In the end I decided to go with the one best suited to printing (i.e. it
> would keep the format no matter the system it is printed on). I needed to
> print my copy out, and figured that anyone serious about learning the rules
> would need to as well.
>
it should be easy enough to make two formats available: one printed to
pdf, one saved as HTML. Word 9.0 makes atrocious html, but it's better
to offer a choice. I'm sure I'm not going to use the system to play with,
for lack of time, players and so on, but I do want to have easy
reference to it. The acrobat reader 4.0 takes 36 mb of memory, meaning
that it is anything but easy to use on my 64 mb system. it's also difficult
to read straight through, on screen, while the cross-referencing html
offers should be great for a large system like Age of Heroes.
> Acrobat is made for postscript, it works great there. Less efficient
> anywhere else (it takes forever on an inkjet, but inkjets just take forever
> anyway).
>
> Boudewijn says that he has some PDF to HTML conversion utilities he's going
> to try. That might be interesting although I think the format will go to
> hell...
>
It didn't work at all :-(, I'm sad to say. Perhaps I can get it to work with
some fiddling and things, but I don't count on it. I'm not too keen on the
format, I dislike the traditional two-column large format for roleplaying
games intensely. I'd like to see rolelplaying games take a cue from,
say, O'Reilly, and use a smaller format and a single-column layout, perhaps
with a sidebar for chatty notes.
--
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt
Psychohist
Acrobat is made for postscript, it works great there. Less efficient
anywhere else (it takes forever on an inkjet, but inkjets just take
forever anyway).
Actually, the printing time on my injet printer was exceeded by the time spent
by acrobat reader rendering the file for printing. My machine is three years
old, but I have to think that Adobe is doing themselves a disservice here.
Yes, they may need to add features to stay in business, but you'd think they
could add new slow features to the Acrobat itself, rather than the reader.
Does Acrobat 4.0 have an option to save files as readable in Reader 3.0? I
wonder if that might help.
More on the format issues in another post.
I knew you would find those.
The ranges for Height and Weight, percentage of population with specific
stats and the like are all off.
One of the reasons for this is the focus on heroic characters and
those that surround them. The unrealistic ranges help to add
variety and interest. In general we're talking about a limited
sample range (PCs and detailed NPCs) and realistic tables would
result in a rather bland area for our heroes to play in.
That's a valid desire - and in fact one of the reasons I was willing to accept
3D6 for my system originally, despite an excessive probability of being at
extremes (I was less strictly world oriented then). Your solution for the
player character is better, as it allows you to tailor the whole curve.
For the NPCs, I'm not so sure. The problem is that they are likely to have
more than one characteristic at or near the extremes. This leaves one
wondering what happened to the people that are unusual in only one respect.
Regarding the character advancement system:
It has influences from all three corners.
Yes. On thinking about it, I saw that a threefold analysis might not be the
right way to view it. Rather, it's a unique way of matching the target genre.
This is the way characters are seen in heroic fantasy.
On to comments on books 2 and 3.
The combat system, like the rest of the rules, has a steep initial learning
curve. One comment I would make is that it really illustrates the difference
between your (and my) approach and the approach of those that say, 'the rules
are just a framework - they can't handle everything, so the gamesmaster should
expect to intervene on a frequent basis'.
These rules are very complete. They handle close enough to everything that I
can't see much of a reason to ever go outside them more than perhaps once every
few years. Presumably that's in large part because you've been seeing special
cases for 20 years, and incorporated them when appropriate; completeness is an
advantage of mature game systems.
I'd like to know more about how they play, but it's hard to figure out just
from reading - there are too many different interconnected numbers and tables
involved.
My major comment on book 3 is, what happened to all the other types of magic?
And why was forester #2 after elementalist?
I'm also a little curious why you separated water and ice for a five element
system; Tolkein always seemed oriented towards three elements to me.
Warren
Psychohist
> The acrobat reader 4.0 takes 36 mb of memory, meaning
> that it is anything but easy to use on my 64 mb system.
36!? It uses less than 16 on mine.
On my Mac, it came with a suggested size of 8 MB. At this setting, it ran out
of memory before it could render half the pages for printing (I was printing
only the odd pages first). You'd think they could set it up so when it was out
of memory, it would just print the spooled pages and clear the queue, but no
... it has to render all the pages requested before printing any.
I upped the memory to 16 MB and printed one quarter of the pages at a time.
But I can imagine his needing 36 MB to print them all at once.
> I'm not too keen on the format, I dislike the traditional two-
> column large format for roleplaying games intensely. I'd like to
> see rolelplaying games take a cue from, say, O'Reilly, and use
> a smaller format and a single-column layout, perhaps
> with a sidebar for chatty notes.
Wow, that would drive me crazy. Just goes to show how different
people are.
I think it's due to you being so browser centric. There it makes
sense as the single column prevents scrolling.
I think there's more to it than that. Your rules are designed to be printed
from a computer, in the U.S. As a result, they are nicely formatted for 8.5x11
inch paper, which means two columns to avoid excessively long lines. Their
length precludes saddle stitching and 5.5x8.5 inch pages; you'd end up with ten
volumes or so.
If Boudewijn prints them, though, I imagine he'd use European A4 paper; it's
narrower, which means the text may get too tiny to read, and the extra length
means a lot of wasted space at the bottom of each page. So unlike my copy, any
printed copy he gets will not look nicely ready for binding.
More generally, though, I think you are right in believing that there would
have to be major changes for an HTML version. Your rules are optimized for
printed text in many ways: the formatting, which I've mentioned; a tree
structured organization, which is needed to permit quick reference through the
extensive table of contents; and explicit cross referencing.
A good set of HTML formatted rules would not need to have such an explicit
structure, and hyperlinks providing the cross referencing should be more
common, and should not waste space by being explicit. It would probably need
an index rather than a table of contents for reference.
I suspect, though, that your dislike for the screen may also be somewhat a
result of your circumstances.
I used to be the same way. And at my present work site, where I have a 15 inch
screen at a 66 Hz refresh rate driven by a cheap driver card, I can't look at
the screen for more than ten minutes at a time without a break.
But I can go for hours in front of my medium high quality 20" screen with a 75
Hz refresh rate at home; I hardly ever use the printer. And the 14" active
matrix screen on my Powerbook is almost as good; even better in terms of screen
flicker, since it has none.
I'm finally recovering the electronic copies of my 'rules' (more like very
extensive notes), and I'm looking forward to throwing away the paper versions.
It's much more convenient to flip through a zillion 1k text files than the same
number of pieces of paper.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> Does Acrobat 4.0 have an option to save files as readable in Reader 3.0?
I wish.
It does have the option to create the PDF in a simplified format without any
on screen support like book marks. If anyone is interested, I could send
them a copy of that.
> For the NPCs, I'm not so sure. The problem is that they are
> likely to have more than one characteristic at or near the
> extremes. This leaves one wondering what happened to the
> people that are unusual in only one respect.
Frankly I rarely use it. Most of the time I assign stats to NPCs. I guess it
can be viewed as a table for generating something more
than the normal crowd, but not quite a hero.
At worst that chart is easily changed according to taste.
One option is to remove the extremes completely (11 and 12) using the
assumption that people with anything that good wouldn't be unimportant.
Or one could change the roll to d1000 and modify the curve.
Feel free to make a suggestion. This is an area where I'm not opposed to
making changes.
<snip> Speaking of the Combat Rules
>Presumably that's in large part because you've been seeing
> special cases for 20 years, and incorporated them when
> appropriate; completeness is an advantage of mature game
> systems.
Very much the case. Although such completeness does cause the following:
> I'd like to know more about how they play, but it's hard to figure
> out just from reading - there are too many different
> interconnected numbers and tables involved.
BIG FAT HEAVY SIGH.
I was worried about this. If you can't decipher them, I doubt anyone could.
Sigh. I really wanted to write these so they'd be understandable.
Would a combat example help? I was intending to do one anyway, but I could
move it up to the top of the list.
Maybe I could walk you through a battle by email. Heck, I'll even spring for
a phone call. With that maybe you could give me better suggestions to make
things clearer.
> My major comment on book 3 is, what happened to all the other
> types of magic? And why was forester #2 after elementalist?
I see you passed over the fluff words on the webpage :)
The rest of the magic classes aren't in a publishable format yet. I'm
rewriting them currently into something close to a final draft. I'll be
adding them later to the web copy of the rules if anyone asks.
I picked Elementalist and Forester as good examples since they are so
different from each other.
> I'm also a little curious why you separated water and ice for a
> five element system; Tolkein always seemed oriented towards
> three elements to me.
He really liked the number three. He liked one, seven and nine as well.
These have significance in Christianity and western thought. Four and five
on the other hand are somewhat frowned upon in comparison.
Interesting enough he did not have a Valar for fire- but did have more then
one for earth (in different aspects). But there were fallen Maiar of
flames...
The three rings did not follow the same pattern as earth was left out
completely.
And the Silmarils were lost to the sky, earth and sea.
Go figure.
It seems likely to me that really neat things could on be made in
the number one or three. The fact that there were four elements was a pain
for Tolkien.
To answer your question, I separated water and ice in order to maintain a
balance of the number of spells per element.
Besides, it not necessary clear to me that ice belongs to water, it has a
heavy air component. It can even be viewed as a negative fire and water
mixed. I didn't want to leave it out as it seems required.
In short, like Tolkien, it was a pain for me as well.
Brian Gleichman
> If Boudewijn prints them, though, I imagine he'd use European
> A4 paper;
That hurts. Sigh. Sorry Boudewijn :(
> I suspect, though, that your dislike for the screen may also be
> somewhat a result of your circumstances.
I have a 17" IDEK with a 85 Hz refresh. Not nearly as good as your 20", but
quite nice anyway.
I just love the printed page.
Besides I have a weird way of dealing with technical or rule books. First I
do just a quick browse through. Then I'll wander with it hand picking it up
and reading a page a random then putting it back down. Repeat.
Odd.
> I'm finally recovering the electronic copies of my 'rules' (more
> like very extensive notes), and I'm looking forward to throwing
> away the paper versions.
One more step towards letting us see them!
Boudewijn Rempt
>
> Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:19990726195309...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
>
>> If Boudewijn prints them, though, I imagine he'd use European
>> A4 paper;
>
> That hurts. Sigh. Sorry Boudewijn :(
>
That's OK. I remember working for an American firm of translators
based in Boulder, and they sent us the printed-out helpfile of
WordPerfect 7 for Unix to edit - and suddenly I had an enormous
stack of American-size paper! Which meant I could finally print
all those papers and rules we had downloaded over the years. But,
as Warren said, the desire to print often results from the quality
of the screen, and I've got a really excellent monitor at my work
and a thoroughly decent one at home.
> Besides I have a weird way of dealing with technical or rule books. First I
> do just a quick browse through. Then I'll wander with it hand picking it up
> and reading a page a random then putting it back down. Repeat.
>
I read the table of contents first, then the index, and I finally
browse a book. With html, I look at the directory structure, and start
browsing after that.
Psychohist
part:
At worst that chart is easily changed according to taste.
option is to remove the extremes completely (11 and 12) using the
assumption that people with anything that good wouldn't be unimportant.
Or one could change the roll to d1000 and modify the curve.
Feel free to make a suggestion. This is an area where I'm not opposed to
making changes.
I'd suggest having the NPC table run from 4-10 for characteristics on the d100
roll, shrinking the tails. On rolling an extreme, you could have a 10% chance
of being one point more extreme, and a 1% chance of being two points more
extreme.
Regarding the combat rules:
I was worried about this. If you can't decipher them, I doubt anyone could.
Actually, I can decipher them - that's not the issue.
What I can't see just by reading is what's important, and what's not. For
example, how important is strength relative to dexterity, and is it strength or
effective strength that's most important? Can I design a quick, light fighter?
Can I design a slow, heavy fighter? What are the relative advantages of each,
given these rules? How do female characters stack up against males?
(Tangent: it's not clear to me why you use a weight multiplier to penalize
female strength, rather than simply a mod to strength itself. The latter would
seem cleaner to me; you used simple positive characteristics mods where they
are better than males.)
Those are the kinds of things I'd want to know when designing a character, for
fear of locking the character into skill tracks that turn out not to be what I
wanted. It seems like it would take several combats, at least, to figure them
out.
That kind of rules depth is good for established players: they still have
things to think about. It makes things tougher for beginner players, though.
My rules have the same problem, by the way. My solution was to have broadsword
and shield be a good all purpose solution, with no major weaknesses.
I don't think a combat example would really help much. I think I'd need to
create several quite different characters and watch combats between them - or
spend a lot more time analyzing the rules.
A nit on the weapons tables: The Scots I know consider claymores to be
generally about 10 lb, thus in the same range as two handed swords. (There's a
lighter thing called a 'basket hilted claymore' used in dancing, but I don't
think that's what you mean.)
On Tolkein's elements:
Interesting enough he did not have a Valar for fire- but did have more then
one for earth (in different aspects). But there were fallen Maiar of
flames...
The three rings did not follow the same pattern as earth was left out
completely.
And the Silmarils were lost to the sky, earth and sea.
Go figure.
I always though he considered earth and fire to be essentially the same
element; the 'dark flame of Udun' was awakened from the earth. Maybe that's
the underearth rather than the earth....
Nenya was the ring of adamant, but seemed associated with the stars and the
sky.
I hope my line lengths are okay. AOL v4 is much worse than AOL v3 for posting.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> I'd suggest having the NPC table run from 4-10 for
> characteristics on the d100 roll, shrinking the tails. On rolling
> an extreme, you could have a 10% chance of being one point
> more extreme, and a 1% chance of being two points more
> extreme.
Not a bad idea. I think it would be better to just use d10000. Saves a
paragraph of explaining re-rolls.
> > I was worried about this. If you can't decipher them, I doubt
> > anyone could.
> Actually, I can decipher them - that's not the issue.
That's a relief, I was getting worried.
The following questions I can help you with.
> For example, how important is strength relative to dexterity,
Effective Strength (ES), Agility (AG) and Quickness (QU) are close to
equally important. Favoring one or the other is a matter of style and the
specific situation you find yourself in.
I did some basic probability math to get them close. QU has the interesting
trade-off because of initiative. It's good to go first, but once you've gone
first, additional points aren't worth as much. However you get a higher
movement rate with higher QU, so that's a bit of a balance.
> and is it strength or effective strength that's most important?
Strength is used with weight to determine Effective Strength. Thereafter
Strength is really only used in special cases. So Effective Strength is the
important one.
> Can I design a quick, light fighter?
> Can I design a slow, heavy fighter?
People have done both with great success.
The system is designed to balance weapon, armor and characteristic selection
to give equal chances (one on one) to any style (except knife fighters and
the like).
It does this for the most part. Certain combinations do offer advantage, but
in general one can't predict the occurrence of these and the player is free
to use whatever style he wishes for the character.
> What are the relative advantages of each, given these rules?
Just because things are equal between single opponents doesn't mean that you
can't find advantage in your typical multiple creature encounter.
And even if advantages/disadvantages even out in the long haul, there are
still ways to use them to your benefit in a specific case...
-
The fast (unarmored, high QU, high Def Base Weapon) fighter will have a
faster 'pace of decision', that is his win/lost is likely to be decided
quicker. He won't be hit often, but will tend to drop when he is.
If taken by surprise or maneuvered to disadvantage, he is likely to be in
serious trouble. He also has more tactical mobility due to his higher
movement rate and better stealth possibilities.
-
The slow (heavy armor, heavy damage weapon, high ES, high LP) fighter won't
win or lose his battles as quickly. He'll be hit more often, but is likely
to shrug some of those off. Being surprised or maneuvered to disadvantage
isn't such a dire concern (but should still be avoided).
He is excellent for slowing the pace of decision of dangerous opponents
until a tactical edge can be gained by your side.
He gains a significant edge if the combination of his LP and Armor exceeds
the maxium normal damage done by his opponent (but beware the solid strikes
or criticals).
> How do female characters stack up against males?
Because of the characteristic balance they come out close to equal. Not
realistic, but it is a fantasy game.
All other things being equal, their low ES rating (two points less than the
male at least) means they should avoid foes with high LP+Armor combinations
unless they process a skill or position edge. They have the edge over low
LP+Armor combinations due to their speed and accuracy.
> (Tangent: it's not clear to me why you use a weight multiplier
> to penalize female strength, rather than simply a mod to
> strength itself.
ES is determined directly from lift (which is determined from ST and
weight).
I could have given a simple -2 to ES (which is the effect of a 75% lift),
but then I wouldn't know what her exact lift is anymore. To find out I would
have to still use that 75%, better to do it once.
I couldn't apply a simple modifier to ST as the percentage varies unevenly
there (although it is close for the most part) and none of them come close
to 75%.
> A nit on the weapons tables: The Scots I know consider
> claymores to be generally about 10 lb, thus in the same range
> as two handed swords.
Point taken.
The weapon in the charts is a light version of the Hand & A Half and the
name is misleading. I really should remove it as I don't know any character
who uses one.
> I always though he considered earth and fire to be essentially
> the same element
It's a thought.
Pity Tolkien never went into detail about the magic of Middle Earth in any
of his writings. With a bit of work you can decide to take it in so many
different directions. And it varies by time period...
> I hope my line lengths are okay. AOL v4 is much worse than AOL v3 for
posting.
Looks ok to me.
Brian Gleichman
>Presumably that's in large part because you've been seeing
>special cases for 20 years, and incorporated them when
>appropriate; completeness is an advantage of mature game
>systems.
Just a note on a potential downfall of this. If one is going to do, be sure
to write down all your special case rulings.
I didn't and I'm STILL remembering things I've left out of the rules draft I
put on the web. The errata page is growing...
Somehow I doubt you made this mistake.
Nightshade
>Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote in message
>news:19990726192002...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
>
>
>>Presumably that's in large part because you've been seeing
>>special cases for 20 years, and incorporated them when
>>appropriate; completeness is an advantage of mature game
>>systems.
>
>Just a note on a potential downfall of this. If one is going to do, be sure
>to write down all your special case rulings.
>
>I didn't and I'm STILL remembering things I've left out of the rules draft I
>put on the web. The errata page is growing...
>
>Somehow I doubt you made this mistake.
This is a common experience with people who've been playing and GMing
in certain game systems long enough. We've got conventions we do in
the Hero System and RuneQuest that are probably written down basically
nowhere, because we've been doing it so long most of us have forgotten
it's not a rule.
Brian Gleichman
> While your comments are useful, having the conclusions presented isn't the
same
> as working them out oneself. I still feel the need to do the latter to
have
> full confidence in them.
I'd agree with you. In fact taking my word for it may well be dangerous,
preventing someone from looking for different relationships.
> You mentioned a character spreadsheet. Can you put it on line, preferably
in
> an older format that can be translated by software more than a year old?
>
The current version is in Excel 97 and is loaded with all the races for
Middle Earth. It makes extensive use of Macros and Excel VB. It's a monster.
There's no instructions for it's use, but I could throw some together real
quick.
Would that work for you?
> Any particular reason you selected 75%?
The original source was a military study that showing women have one third
the upper body strength, two-thirds the leg strength, and all the abdomen
strength of a man.
I have only one strength characteristic so I'd have to round all of that
into it.
It's an average of about 67%. Adjusting for the fact that men tend to weigh
about 1.2 times as much on the average gives 1.2*.67 or around 80%.
Given that abdomen strength isn't really all the significant, I thought
myself justified to drop it to 75% to have it a round number (and it fit the
ES chart nicely).
In reality, one should heavily discount abdomen strength- so this is being
quite generous. A value of 60% would be more realistic.
There are most likely more up to date studies, but this works and fits the
source material nicely as well.
Psychohist
Just a note on a potential downfall of this. If one is going to do,
be sure to write down all your special case rulings.
I didn't and I'm STILL remembering things I've left out of the
rules draft I put on the web. The errata page is growing...
Somehow I doubt you made this mistake.
Actually, I used to make it; I've only within the last few years started
writing down every interpretation religiously. (And boy do my rules pages look
messy at the moment - another reason to keep them on computer.)
But I took a little different approach than you; when too many interpretations
started to pile up, I tended to do a complete reworking of the system. So I
don't have to remember anything from before the most recent such reworking,
which was only a decade ago.
Warren
Psychohist
The following questions I can help you with.
While your comments are useful, having the conclusions presented isn't the same
as working them out oneself. I still feel the need to do the latter to have
full confidence in them.
> What are the relative advantages of each, given these rules?
Just because things are equal between single opponents doesn't
mean that you can't find advantage in your typical multiple
creature encounter.
And even if advantages/disadvantages even out in the long haul,
there are still ways to use them to your benefit in a specific
case...
Yes. These are the things I find interesting about good rules systems.
You mentioned a character spreadsheet. Can you put it on line, preferably in
an older format that can be translated by software more than a year old?
ES is determined directly from lift (which is determined from ST and
weight).
I could have given a simple -2 to ES (which is the effect of a 75%
lift), but then I wouldn't know what her exact lift is anymore. To
find out I would have to still use that 75%, better to do it once.
I couldn't apply a simple modifier to ST as the percentage varies
unevenly there (although it is close for the most part) and none
of them come close to 75%.
Depends on how close you want it to be, I guess. -1 ST results in 80% of the
lift capacity except for very low ST. That means -2 ST is generally 64%
(though the case of a 2 modified to a zero would be a problem).
Any particular reason you selected 75%?
Warren
David Alex Lamb
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Given that abdomen strength isn't really all the significant, I thought
>myself justified to drop it to 75% to have it a round number (and it fit the
>ES chart nicely).
>
>In reality, one should heavily discount abdomen strength- so this is being
>quite generous. A value of 60% would be more realistic.
Presumably this is because childbirth has no significant role for player
characters in this campaign? :-)
>There are most likely more up to date studies, but this works and fits the
>source material nicely as well.
--
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~dalamb/
Psychohist
The current version is in Excel 97 and is loaded with all the races for
Middle Earth. It makes extensive use of Macros and Excel VB. It's a
monster.
There's no instructions for it's use, but I could throw some together
real quick.
Would that work for you?
Um, no thanks. I really don't care for loading spreadsheets with macros; I'm a
hypochondriac.
The original source was a military study that showing women have one third
the upper body strength, two-thirds the leg strength, and all the abdomen
strength of a man.
Any references, here? That sounds like an interesting source.
Also, do you know how they measured, and who they measured? Those
differentials look large to me. I'm also wondering if they measured comparable
groups of men and women (I'm not convinced average military groups are), and
whether it was before or after basic (before would be a better measure).
Do you have a similar source for the positive female stat modifiers in
quickness, agility, and intelligence?
Warren Dew
Brian Gleichman
> Um, no thanks. I really don't care for loading spreadsheets with macros;
I'm a
> hypochondriac.
I understand.
I'll be replacing the spreadsheet with an access database eventually, it's
too hard keeping things updated with spreadsheets.
> Any references, here? That sounds like an interesting source.
Sadly no.
It was one of those things I read fifteen years ago and didn't keep the
article. This applies to nearly all the information I used going into the
game. I don't remember where the weight chart came from at all.
> whether it was before or after basic (before would be a better
> measure).
I seem to recall that it might have been an after boot measure as that would
have been when the military would've been concerned with the results.
While a before measure would have been better for general population
results, I would prefer an after measurement since my primary interest is
the adventuring character.
It would also help with removing the higher percentage of 'sit around'
lifestyles we have now days.
> Do you have a similar source for the positive female stat modifiers in
> quickness, agility, and intelligence?
Not Intelligence, Intuition.
Like all things intuition, it has no reliable grounding in the real world.
It's a tip of the hat to the 'female intuition' concept and an effort to
balance the fact that their smaller size limits their location points.
As for Quickness and Agility, well...
They really don't deserve this I'm afraid. Not at least for their use in the
combat system.
I've seen studies that give them some advantage in these areas. However,
rather sadly, these don't scale up to actual benefits in combat or athletics
for the most part. Seems that these advantages are scaled for lower strength
activities and not at the point of the strength curve they'd be using for
combat.
Since my idea was to show the male/female differences as seen in heroic
fantasy, I went ahead and gave them the bonuses anyway.
They should get a constitution bonus. However their fatigue in battle and
the like should be less so I counted it even. At the time I determine those
modifiers I hadn't split Fatigue into it's own value. I need to revisit this
area.
We do also give them a bonus when rolling their natural 'death age', but
that's in the Campaign section and isn't part of the rules on the web.
Psychohist
As for Quickness and Agility, well...
They really don't deserve this I'm afraid. Not at least for
their use in the combat system.
I've seen studies that give them some advantage in these areas.
However, rather sadly, these don't scale up to actual benefits
in combat or athletics for the most part. Seems that these
advantages are scaled for lower strength activities and not
at the point of the strength curve they'd be using for
combat.
Since my idea was to show the male/female differences as seen
in heroic fantasy, I went ahead and gave them the bonuses anyway.
I'd venture that the studies are correct, and that the combat and athletics
results are simply because these attributes aren't as important for combat.
Certainly women dancers tend to be better than men. For athletics, there may
also be issues about training and self selection; Title 9 has given us a world
championship soccer team, which the men don't come close to (and all the people
on alt.arts.ballet are worried that little girls will now want to play soccer
instead of dance).
My system gives women an average of about -2 Strength and +1 Dexterity and
Constitution (on 3D6); plus the height and weight tables are adjusted to match
the values given in the 1980 Reader's Digest almanac. Average women end up at
a considerable disadvantage in straight melee combat as a result, because
combat survivability is so strongly correlated to Strength and Size.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> Certainly women dancers tend to be better than men. For
> athletics, there may also be issues about training and self
> selection ; Title 9 has given us a world championship soccer
> team, which the men don't come close to
?
I've seen a lot of information that would classify the above as half
illusion and the rest as misinterpretation.
But let's not go into it. It's not important and this isn't a good place to
debate it. Just log my disagreement.
Psychohist
comparison? The soccer comparison is questionable, I admit.
But I do think there's a real effect that physically inclined females are more
likely to focus on dance than athletics. And while there are a few good male
ballet dancers, if you look at the corps - the body of dancers that don't get
the solo spots, but make up the large majority of any ballet company - the
women are far, far better than the men.
Of course, the most physically inclined men aren't in dance, so that's not a
fair comparison. But I don't think it's more unfair to compare men and women
in dance than to compare men and women in the military.
Warren
----
Brian Gleichman
> I'm curious - were you questioning the dance comparison, or the soccer
> comparison? The soccer comparison is questionable, I admit.
I'm real surprised you attempted the soccer one at all. That logic is really
a reach.
As for dance, the studies I looked at would indicate that females should do
well at any physical activity that did not require strength and speed.
Any time strength is added to the requirements, any advantage in
dexterity/quickness is more than lost as the woman moves outside the optimal
usage curve for her physical structure.
So I guess it depends upon what type of dance we are speaking of.
By the way, I did some checking and it looks like the military study I wrote
about earlier was pre-boot (meant to measure the general recruitment pool).
I've done some checking and it looks like post-boot/actual enlistment would
justify the modifier I'm using after all.
> Of course, the most physically inclined men aren't in dance,
> so that's not a fair comparison. But I don't think it's more
> unfair to compare men and women in dance than to compare
> men and women in the military.
Many of the studies I've seen were non-military (I like the military ones
given the type of campaign I run). Many were in athletics covering
basketball and various Olympic sports. Some of them were pure human motion
studies.
Psychohist
As for dance, the studies I looked at would indicate that
females should do well at any physical activity that did not
require strength and speed.
Any time strength is added to the requirements, any advantage in
dexterity/quickness is more than lost as the woman moves outside
the optimal usage curve for her physical structure.
In other words, the effect of strength outweigh the effects of agility.
So I guess it depends upon what type of dance we are speaking of.
Offhand, I can't think of any that require much upper body strength.
By the way, I did some checking and it looks like the military
study I wrote about earlier was pre-boot (meant to measure the
general recruitment pool). I've done some checking and it looks
like post-boot/actual enlistment would justify the modifier I'm
using after all.
Very interesting. So the women start out with 1/3 the upper body strength of
men, but get to about 3/5 by the end of basic? Indicating that basic does a
lot more for the women ... wonder what that implies.
Warren
John Morrow
>Very interesting. So the women start out with 1/3 the upper body strength of
>men, but get to about 3/5 by the end of basic? Indicating that basic does a
>lot more for the women ... wonder what that implies.
It could also have to do with drop-out rates, too. This is a very
touchy subject all around because it impacts all sorts of political
ideologies. Because of that, it is often difficult to find objective
data that isn't designed to support one outlook or the other. The
issue is also clouded by steroid (male hormone) use by women athletes.
The best way to compare, of course, would be to have women compete
alongside men in athletic competitions. Given current attitudes about
sex roles, I have to believe that would be happening if direct
competition was possible competitively.
As for dancers, do women ballet dancers often pick up and hold other
dancers? It has been my experience with dancing and ice skating that
the men generally pick up women and women don't do much lifting or am
I just missing it (I admit I am not a ballet fan)? If the men are
more able to lift other dancers and maneuver with them, then by what
measure of women better dancers?
John Morrow
Nightshade
>As for dancers, do women ballet dancers often pick up and hold other
>dancers? It has been my experience with dancing and ice skating that
>the men generally pick up women and women don't do much lifting or am
>I just missing it (I admit I am not a ballet fan)? If the men are
>more able to lift other dancers and maneuver with them, then by what
>measure of women better dancers?
Probably rather depends on how much primacy one places in patterns
that involve picking up other dancers. I don't know from ballet, but
it hardly seems to be a signficant part of modern dance.
John R. Snead
: By the way, I did some checking and it looks like the military study I wrote
: about earlier was pre-boot (meant to measure the general recruitment pool).
: I've done some checking and it looks like post-boot/actual enlistment would
: justify the modifier I'm using after all.
If these figures are pre-boot camp then I would seriously downplay the
strength dimorphism. At least in the US women, on average, do
considerably less heavy muscle-building excersize than men (I'll dig up
the reference if you want). While there are definitely innate gender
differences based on strength, they are notably less than those found in
the US population.
Once interesting fact is that this discrepancy in activity is shared by
most of the first world, but for the past 20 years in most places (US
included) women have been getting more physical activity. Conditions are
definitely better than 20 years ago in the US, where the vast majority of
women did almost no strenuous exercise after then left High School.
During this same time period, the gender gap in performance in constests
like the Olympics has narrowed considerably.
If I were modeling gender-based stat differences then I'd use data on
recent Olympic medal winners since you have data for people who were
already at or near their body's capacity, rather than pre-boot camp data,
which in many cases merely show relative levels of physical inactivity.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
Brian Gleichman
news:7nvlbj$3...@dfw-ixnews9.ix.netcom.com...
> If these figures are pre-boot camp then I would seriously downplay the
> strength dimorphism.
You missed the part where I stated the post-boot figures come close to
negative modifiers I do use.
Further study indicated that with intensive special training (training NOT
given to men) that women would almost (but still not quite) reach the
negative strength modifiers I give them.
The study determined that the best the Army could hope for was to get 3% of
the women (after intensive training) to meet the physical requirements 60%
of the men could (without training).
Needless to say, the Army was left in a sad boat since they were required
not only to allow women in, but to put them in the same boot training with
the men. This has resulted in a wide range taming down of boot for both
genders in order to prevent women from failing. Even to the point I might
add, of restricting the language the DI may use and providing 'time outs' to
the boots in order to prevent 'stress'.
The Marines have avoided this problem until now, but the new commander
(appointed under Clinton) promises a less traditional Marine Corp...
I leave the implications of all this to the reader.
Psychohist
training, John Morrow posts, in part:
It could also have to do with drop-out rates, too.
Good point. Makes one wish for the chance to look at the original data.
As for dancers, do women ballet dancers often pick up and hold other
dancers?
Actually, neither ballerinas nor ballerinos (male ballet dancers) typically
pick up and hold other dancers. Ballerinos can assist leaps and certain poses,
but the ballerina does most of the work of getting her center of mass off the
floor.
If the men are more able to lift other dancers and maneuver with
them, then by what measure of women better dancers?
In ballet, only the men are expected to assist leaps and such, but only the
women are expected to go on pointe.
Most dancers consider going on pointe to be 'dancing', while lifting is as much
'weightlifting' as dancing. That's why the woman is the 'dancer', while the
man is only the 'partner' - he's more of a prop, like the scenery pieces, than
a dancer.
When you compare men and women at the same rank - for example, non soloists in
the corps - doing the same figures, the women are generally - nay, uniformly -
more balanced and more graceful.
While there's a cultural effect that works in favor of the women here, I doubt
it's any greater than the cultural effect that works in favor of men in
athletics. It's no more a coincidence that one thinks of a woman when one
hears 'ballet dancer' than that one thinks of a man when one hears 'football
player'.
Perhaps a better example is Scottish Highland dancing. Highland is
competitive; it was exclusively male for the first half of this century,
stemming as it did from military celebrations.
They started allowing women to enter Highland competitions around the middle of
the century. The women immediately started beating the kilts off the guys.
Today, it's almost exclusively a female activity, despite the swords - the men
just can't cut it.
There are real physical differences between the sexes, and they don't all go in
the same direction.
Warren Dew
John Morrow
>In ballet, only the men are expected to assist leaps and such, but only the
>women are expected to go on pointe.
OK. I'm more familiar with ice skating than any form of real dancing.
>When you compare men and women at the same rank - for example, non soloists in
>the corps - doing the same figures, the women are generally - nay, uniformly -
>more balanced and more graceful.
Do bear in mind that women have a lower center of gravity than men do.
This does help a lot with certain activities.
>They started allowing women to enter Highland competitions around the middle of
>the century. The women immediately started beating the kilts off the guys.
>Today, it's almost exclusively a female activity, despite the swords - the men
>just can't cut it.
Which is the way to really test the differences...
>There are real physical differences between the sexes, and they don't all go in
>the same direction.
Agreed. But they don't necessarily balance out equally, either.
John Morrow
John Morrow
>During this same time period, the gender gap in performance in constests
>like the Olympics has narrowed considerably.
You will notice, however, that recent Olympic performance has been
slipping, in part because certain Eastern European governments (who
shall remain nameless) no long have steroid programs for their women
athletes and steroid testing, in general, has gotten better. In
particular, Eastern European women were once dominating running events
but African women are now dominating those events (for a variety of
reasons) and the yearly increases in performance are no longer there.
If you give a woman male hormones, you should expect male-like
performance. But I'm not sure what that says about a woman's
natural potential.
John Morrow
Psychohist
General comments first. This set of rules seems to invite character
optimization almost as much as Champions, but it's much more difficult. I
think it's not unlikely that a beginning player will make some mistakes during
character generation that he will regret later on.
For example, the rules permit one to assign the attribute rolls to attributes
as desired (I think). But I don't think it's possible to understand the
tradeoffs here without significant experience playing.
Also, there doesn't seem to be the same flexibility with background as with
attributes. Background (by which I mean everything about the character other
than attributes that is rolled) is more susceptible to manipulation through
character points, though; perhaps that balances things.
On to specific issues.
There is an example on p6 that uses a lift modifier of 1.8 for a character with
a ST of 10. The table under ST seems to give a lift modifier of 2.0 for a ST
of 10. ?
I assume CuH on the character sheet is the same thing as CP in the rules?
Section 3.6.2 should refer to 1.4 rather than 1.13 for the COnstitution
multiplier, I think.
A 60% chance of any siblings being male? Is female infanticide really common
here? Or are you expecting most player characters to be female?
In the combat rules....
There's a DEFense based on QUickness, and a Dodge Modifier (DM) based on
AGility. But, the Dodge Chance (DC) takes DEF as an input, not DM. What is DM
used for? If DC should depend on DM instead of DEF, what is DEF used for?
SEction 14.0 seems to imply, but does not state, that combat modifiers for
armor reduce strike, parry, and dodge chances (SC, PC, and DC). Is this
correct?
If so, it seems to me that the system encourages low level characters to use
armor, but high level characters are better off without it, which is counter to
my intuition.
Here's my analysis: One starts with a parry chance on the order of 80%.
Wearing full plate, say, will reduce that to 72% - increasing the chance of
being hit by a factor of 1.4. However, the armor will probably absorb more
than half the damage taken - reducing the damage taken by a factor of 2 or 3.
So armor is a net win. (Okay, it hurts one's hit chances by a factor of 1.15
or so, but that doesn't really change the reasoning.)
Once one is fourth level, though, one's base parry chance will be on the order
of 99%. Wearing full plate will reduce that to 92% or so, increasing the
chance of being hit by a factor of 8 or so. Armor still reduces the damage
taken by only a factor of 2 or 3. So armor is a net lose.
(It suddenly becomes a win again once one hits a parry chance of 106% or so,
though some characters never get to that point.)
Am I missing something here?
Warren
Brian Gleichman
I was hoping to get feedback like this. These rules have only been seen by
people who know them for too long.
Thank you. This is very helpful.
> For example, the rules permit one to assign the attribute rolls to
> attributes as desired (I think).
Yes, characteristics are rolled and assigned as the player wishes.
It states this in section 1.0 but perhaps I need to phrase it better or
emphasize (bold) it?
> But I don't think it's possible to understand the tradeoffs here
> without significant experience playing.
True. I tend to give hints and examples to new players during character
creation, but the effects are sometimes subtle. One needs to experiment with
the game to really understand it.
There are few mistakes that are fatal. One hint: blowing off Will Power may
get you into a world of hurt against certain mystical foes. Put a low
characteristic there at your own risk or with the expectation of be
vulnerability in this area.
> There is an example on p6 that uses a lift modifier of 1.8 for a character
with
> a ST of 10. The table under ST seems to give a lift modifier of 2.0 for a
ST
> of 10. ?
The Chart is correct.
> I assume CuH on the character sheet is the same thing as CP in the rules?
Yes. I've already correct this problem on the character sheet. I intend to
post revision 4.1 after I've gotten enough feedback to correct the worst
errors.
> Section 3.6.2 should refer to 1.4 rather than 1.13 for the COnstitution
> multiplier, I think.
Correct.
> A 60% chance of any siblings being male?
More human males are born than females. Something I read gave this as 6 of
10. Most likely slightly overstated. Males die quicker than females and the
percentage reverses itself as you look at increasing age groups.
The chart simply indicates what the family started with, not where it end up
at.
The Campaign book would have the rules for determining sibling survival. I
don't have anything real concrete right now as no one as asked about it yet.
> There's a DEFense based on QUickness, and a Dodge
> Modifier (DM) based on AGility. But, the Dodge Chance (DC)
> takes DEF as an input, not DM. What is DM used for?
DM is used for reducing the opponent's DC (15.4).
DEF is used for reducing the opponent's SC (15.2)
PM is used for reducing the opponent's PC (15.3)
> SEction 14.0 seems to imply, but does not state, that combat modifiers for
> armor reduce strike, parry, and dodge chances (SC, PC, and DC). Is this
> correct?
No.
This is an example of a rule so old and so ingrained in everyone that we
just KNEW it was written in the rules. All dozen or so people that have
looked at it.
And on top of it, it's one of the most important concepts in the whole
combat system.
Sigh, I apologize.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
*** Armor modifies SC, DEF, PM, PC, DM, and DC equally ***
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
The QUickness modifier is already considered in the general armor modifier
and does not subtract further from these combat values.
You'll want to redo your analysis.
A couple of hints:
Characters almost never go down on CP. The disabling effect of exceed their
LP is the single most important break point.
Don't dismiss the effect of armor on your ability to attack. As it slows you
down in getting out of the way, it slows you down in putting your foe in the
way.
John Kim
John Morrow <mor...@eris.io.com> wrote:
>As for dancers, do women ballet dancers often pick up and hold other
>the men generally pick up women and women don't do much lifting or am
>more able to lift other dancers and maneuver with them, then by what
>measure of women better dancers?
What is the relevance of the lifting here? Are you suggesting
that dancing skill should be judged based on how much one can lift with
one's arms?
In any case, the whole question of what is the "inherent"
genetic physical difference between the sexes seems to me irrelevant
unless you have a game set in a sex-blind society. In game terms,
what should matter is what a woman is really capable of. In a
setting similar to historical Earth, women who are competitive in
athletics and/or combat should be much rarer than any genetic bias.
If rarity factors into the cost or random roll for stats in
a game system, then women in such societies should have moderate to
severe penalties against any sort of athletic or combative skill,
representing both genetic and social factors that make such ability
rare. If not, then I don't see how the genetic sexual dimorphism is
relevant for the game.
Irina Rempt
> More human males are born than females. Something I read gave this as 6 of
> 10. Most likely slightly overstated. Males die quicker than females and the
> percentage reverses itself as you look at increasing age groups.
In the Netherlands in 1990, 51 of every 100 children born alive were
boys; 51% of living two-year-olds were girls.
I think 50% is a safe percentage. Unless, of course, there's some
reason in your world for more boys to be born; in times of war (wneh
many more males than females die) nature tends to adjust. In the
years after WWII the ratio of boys to girls increased significantly
(not to more than 55% or so, hoewever).
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)
Brian Gleichman
news:7o0tgp$rp$1...@essle.valdyas.org...
> In the Netherlands in 1990, 51 of every 100 children born alive were
> boys; 51% of living two-year-olds were girls.
I wasn't interested in just those born alive. Remember, I discounted sibling
survival.
A quick check shows that 55% male is the proper number (my old source did
round up) for today's world. Your 51% discounts stillbirths and miscarriages
and these affect males more often.
I'll go ahead and change it to 55%.
Psychohist
From: "Brian Gleichman" <glei...@mindspring.com>
Date: Sun, 01 August 1999 01:03 AM EDT
Message-id: <7o0khu$al9$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>
The Chart is correct.
Correct.
More human males are born than females. Something I read gave this as 6 of
10. Most likely slightly overstated. Males die quicker than females and the
percentage reverses itself as you look at increasing age groups.
The chart simply indicates what the family started with, not where it end up
at.
No.
Sigh, I apologize.
A couple of hints:
--------
Brian Gleichman posts, in part:
It states this in section 1.0 but perhaps I need to phrase
it better or emphasize (bold) it?
It was pretty clear, I don't think you need to change it. If you do, changing
the wording would be better than just making it boldface; the British colonial
method of clarification is not generally that useful.
More human males are born than females. Something I read
gave this as 6 of 10. Most likely slightly overstated.
Males die quicker than females and the percentage reverses
itself as you look at increasing age groups.
The chart simply indicates what the family started with, not
where it end up at.
The Campaign book would have the rules for determining
sibling survival. I don't have anything real concrete right
now as no one as asked about it yet.
I've seen percentages ranging from 51% to 53%; none as high as 60% for the
general population. I do remember seeing something higher for Orthodox Jews -
possibly around 60% - possibly as a result of religious strictures on sex.
I was wondering about whether that was initial family size or surviving family
size. "Family size" may be the wrong term, as it's likely not all of the
children were alive at any one time.
I think you need to deal with survival in the same place you deal with family
size and gender balance. The point of rolling for birth order, it seems to me,
is to know whether you are the inheritor or not; you can't know this without
knowing whether those ahead of you have died.
Admittedly, survival may be more complex, as it may be dependent on social
class.
DM is used for reducing the opponent's DC (15.4).
DEF is used for reducing the opponent's SC (15.2)
PM is used for reducing the opponent's PC (15.3)
Okay. The chart in 12.0 should be fixed; it says DC uses DEF rather than DM.
Warren
Psychohist
In the Netherlands in 1990, 51 of every 100 children born alive were
boys; 51% of living two-year-olds were girls.
I think 50% is a safe percentage. Unless, of course, there's some
reason in your world for more boys to be born; in times of war (wneh
many more males than females die) nature tends to adjust. In the
years after WWII the ratio of boys to girls increased significantly
(not to more than 55% or so, hoewever).
I wonder if this is really a "nature tends to adjust" thing. It doesn't seem
like extra boys born in the '40s would compensate for loss of men who were born
in the '20s or before.
In the U.S., I believe the ratio of boys to girls born increased during the war
itself, but decreased during the baby boom afterwards.
The way this is generally believed to work is that less frequent sex increases
the likelihood of having boys. It's actually more complicated than that, but
that's a good approximation.
Actually, this may be a "nature tends to adjust" thing, after all. In a
society which is constantly at war, you'd want to skew the births towards
warriors, which means boys. And this would happen if the men were spending
most of their time fighting, rather than at home.
I wonder if the cultural anthropologists have noticed that one.
Warren
Psychohist
Do bear in mind that women have a lower center of gravity than men do.
This does help a lot with certain activities.
This is true - both because their center of mass is an inch or two lower
relative to their height, and because they tend to be shorter. Shortness also
helps because of square/cube effects - more leg muscle cross section for unit
weight.
But I think women are better dancers even controlling for those effects, based
on observations from ballroom; nor do I think being shorter could completely
explain the historical Highland competition results.
Agreed. But they don't necessarily balance out equally, either.
I definitely agree with that.
Responding to John Snead:
You will notice, however, that recent Olympic performance has been
slipping, in part because certain Eastern European governments (who
shall remain nameless) no long have steroid programs for their women
athletes and steroid testing, in general, has gotten better.
Of course, they've presumably dropped their steroid programs for their men, as
well. But I'd agree that steroids probably benefit (?) the women atheletes
more than the men.
In particular, Eastern European women were once dominating running
events but African women are now dominating those events (for a
variety of reasons)
They're using the steroids now?
Just kidding. Presumably it's for the same reason that African men dominate
their running events (longer legs, as far as I can tell). Which touches on
another source of heritable differences that's even touchier than sex....
John Kim:
In any case, the whole question of what is the "inherent"
genetic physical difference between the sexes seems to me irrelevant
unless you have a game set in a sex-blind society. In game terms,
what should matter is what a woman is really capable of. In a
setting similar to historical Earth, women who are competitive in
athletics and/or combat should be much rarer than any genetic bias.
If rarity factors into the cost or random roll for stats in
a game system, then women in such societies should have moderate to
severe penalties against any sort of athletic or combative skill,
representing both genetic and social factors that make such ability
rare. If not, then I don't see how the genetic sexual dimorphism is
relevant for the game.
Several points, here.
First, 'heritable' does not necessarily mean 'genetic'. I'm interested in both
of these forms of differences.
Also, the point of rolling for heritable attributes and allowing the player to
select, say, skills, is to try to reflect as best we can the dichotomy between
the things the character is stuck with and the things the character has control
over. The reflection of the character level dichotomy here in a player level
dichotomy is important to some players.
Finally, the approach can lead to interesting experimental results. I used
this approach, and the result was that a larger proportion of the male
characters tended to become combat experts, and a larger percentage of the
female characters specialized in magic.
I don't think this was initially a result of conscious cultural pigeonholing on
the part of the players. Rather, I think it was that players selected the
characters' specializations based on their rolled characteristics. The skill
based gender roles emerged naturally from the attribute system, without any
need for constraints at the skill system level.
The trend did become more pronounced as time progressed; this could be
interpreted as a cultural effect.
This makes me suspect that this effect occurs in the player world as well;
'cultural' effects aren't arbitrary, but are rooted in real, basic,
differences.
Warren Dew
Brian Gleichman
>> It states this in section 1.0 but perhaps I need to phrase
>> it better or emphasize (bold) it?
>
> It was pretty clear, I don't think you need to change it. If you
> do, changing the wording would be better than just making it
> boldface; the British colonial method of clarification is not
> generally that useful.
Got something against yelling? Works wonders on us British colonials, we're
not subtle people as a rule.
<snip> A concern about birth ratios which I've answered in another reply to
Irina.
Although I'm beginning to doubt even the 55% male source I found, the rate
of stillbirths seems too low to drop this to 51%.
> I think you need to deal with survival in the same place you
> deal with family size and gender balance. The point of rolling
> for birth order, it seems to me, is to know whether you are the
> inheritor or not; you can't know this without knowing whether
> those ahead of you have died.
This is an excellent point. But as you say, a complex one to say the least.
As I see it, the best approach would be to determine a 'age of death' for
every sibling (and parent while I'm at it).
I could limit it to the game's age categories (adding one for birth) and
just roll a random year within that range...
Anyone know of a good source for such a task?
I'm still not sure that such a rule section shouldn't be in the GM's
campaign book. Until the NPC dies, it's information that only he has.
> > DM is used for reducing the opponent's DC (15.4).
> DEF is used for reducing the opponent's SC (15.2)
> PM is used for reducing the opponent's PC (15.3)
>
> Okay. The chart in 12.0 should be fixed; it says DC uses DEF > rather
than DM.
I think I see what's misleading you.
A character Dodge Chance is determined using DEF. When he actually goes to
dodge, this chance is reduced by the opponent's DM.
The chart in 12.0 is correct.
John Kim
Warren Dew <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
>John Kim:
>> In any case, the whole question of what is the "inherent" genetic
>> physical difference between the sexes seems to me irrelevant unless
>> you have a game set in a sex-blind society. In game terms, what
>> should matter is what a woman is really capable of. In a setting
>> similar to historical Earth, women who are competitive in athletics
>> and/or combat should be much rarer than any genetic bias.
>
>Also, the point of rolling for heritable attributes and allowing the
>player to select, say, skills, is to try to reflect as best we can the
>dichotomy between the things the character is stuck with and the things
>the character has control over.
My point was that if you try to reflect "as best you can" what
things a character has no choice over, then the local culture and
particular circumstances of birth are completely dominant. The
current discussion over differences between sexes in 1990's athletics
is almost completely irrelevant to the question of what a character
actually has choice over, unless your campaign is set in a sex-, race-,
and class-blind game world.
If you want to do the best you can to represent reality on this
level, then for most campaign worlds I think both attributes and skills
should be influenced by the sexism of the local society.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>Finally, the approach can lead to interesting experimental results. I
>used this approach, and the result was that a larger proportion of the
>male characters tended to become combat experts, and a larger percentage
>of the female characters specialized in magic.
>
>I don't think this was initially a result of conscious cultural pigeon-
>holing on the part of the players. Rather, I think it was that players
>selected the characters' specializations based on their rolled charac-
>teristics. The skill based gender roles emerged naturally from the
>attribute system, without any need for constraints at the skill system
>level.
>
>The trend did become more pronounced as time progressed; this could be
>interpreted as a cultural effect.
>
>This makes me suspect that this effect occurs in the player world as
>well; 'cultural' effects aren't arbitrary, but are rooted in real,
>basic, differences.
My point is that this an inaccurate representation of the
situation in your campaign world -- unless you think that it was
really true that the game-society was fairly sex-blind initially
and became more sexist over the course of the campaign. While I
am willing to believe that your players did not consciously pigeon-
hole the characters, I also tend to doubt that this choice has much
to do with the reality of how gender roles are chosen in either the
game-world or the real world. Among other things, I think that the
real, basic difference of the ability to bear and suckle children
have a much greater effect than the difference in average height
and musculature.
John Morrow
> What is the relevance of the lifting here? Are you suggesting
>that dancing skill should be judged based on how much one can lift with
>one's arms?
I was suggesting that it could be a factor.
> In any case, the whole question of what is the "inherent"
>genetic physical difference between the sexes seems to me irrelevant
>unless you have a game set in a sex-blind society. In game terms,
>what should matter is what a woman is really capable of. In a
>setting similar to historical Earth, women who are competitive in
>athletics and/or combat should be much rarer than any genetic bias.
Not true. Society determines what people normally do. Genetics
determines what people can do. I might find it perfectly plausible to
have a single woman who trained herself to be very strong, even in a
world that otherwise discourages women from doing so. History is full
of examples of women disguising themselves as men, for example, to
fight in wars. But I might find it equally implausible that such a
woman could ever be as strong as the strongest man. They cover two
different things.
My own personal take is that there is probably no reason why a woman
has to be limited in strength to match the real world in a fantasy
game. But such liberties with reality can affect SOD for some people.
John Morrow
John Kim
John Morrow <mor...@eris.io.com> wrote:
>jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu (John Kim) writes:
>> In any case, the whole question of what is the "inherent" genetic
>> physical difference between the sexes seems to me irrelevant
>> unless you have a game set in a sex-blind society. In game terms,
>> what should matter is what a woman is really capable of. In a
>> setting similar to historical Earth, women who are competitive in
>> athletics and/or combat should be much rarer than any genetic bias.
>
>Not true. Society determines what people normally do. Genetics
>determines what people can do. I might find it perfectly plausible to
>have a single woman who trained herself to be very strong, even in a
>world that otherwise discourages women from doing so. History is full
>of examples of women disguising themselves as men, for example, to
>fight in wars. But I might find it equally implausible that such a
>woman could ever be as strong as the strongest man.
I don't really get your point. The genetic limit for
strength would only be reached in practice by someone who had a
special diet and conditioning from birth, and the person would be
considered a freak with abnormal hormone levels. (A woman at this
level would not easily be recognizable as such.)
In practice, the only times I have had players want to make
someone who as strong (or nearly so) as the strongest man in the world
were in cinematic or fantasy games where realistic genetic limits were
not relevant.
If you are not at the genetic limits, then the issue is one of
rarity and practical achievability of strength. Here society has an
enormous effect: both from social conditioning as well as diet and
childhood conditions.
Psychohist
While I am willing to believe that your players did not
consciously pigeonhole the characters, I also tend to
doubt that this choice has much to do with the reality of
how gender roles are chosen in either the game-world or
the real world. Among other things, I think that the
real, basic difference of the ability to bear and suckle
children have a much greater effect than the difference
in average height and musculature.
Doubt it as much as you wish. I only see that I have some data from what is
essentially a simulation experiment, and size and physical strength seem to
correlate better to the establishment of cultural norms in this case than the
ability to bear and suckle young.
With regard to the player world, you are free to bring data of your own to the
table. Of most interest, in this case, would be data on a mammalian species
where the females are larger.
Warren
Kip Manley
not -- long story, short pier. Trust me.) I've been lurking the past
couple of days with the intent on trying to familiarize myself with the
current state of the board before leaping in, but this topic caught my
eye, so here we go, as the angels slink back from the brink, muttering
under their breaths...
John Morrow wrote:
Not true. Society determines what people normally do. Genetics
determines what people can do. I might find it perfectly plausible to
have a single woman who trained herself to be very strong, even in a
world that otherwise discourages women from doing so. History is full
of examples of women disguising themselves as men, for example, to
fight in wars. But I might find it equally implausible that such a
woman could ever be as strong as the strongest man. They cover two
different things.
Actually, I'd argue that we don't yet know what genetics dictates as far
as body strength goes, when broken down into the two broad categories of
male and female. When based on averages of broad samples of current men
and women, it's true that men tend to be taller, stronger, and more
massive. But that's as much due to nurture as nature; the input from each
isn't known.
A couple of interesting factoids: if people are given an infant to feed,
and they aren't allowed to check the sex themselves, but are told "This
is a boy" or "That is a girl," they tend automatically to feed a boy more
than a girl -- regardless of the actual sex or behavior of the infant. By
as much as a factor of two to one. Which is interesting when compared
with the second factoid: in most industrialized countries, average height
and mass for women is increasing much faster than it is for men, which
some attribute to the more institutionalized and egalitarian nutrition
found in daycare and schools. Also, the gap between male and female
sports records -- in general, speaking broadly -- is slowly but surely
diminishing.
In other words, I'm not so sure we can say that genetics dictate that the
strongest woman can't be as strong as the strongest man. Jury's still out
on that one. And given that sex and physiology are so damn complicated, I
think it will end up hung.
The topic? Say something about the topic? Oh. The only time I could see a
random mechanic necessary to give you an approximation of sexual
dimorphism is when the difference between males and females is different
than the one you're used to, culturally speaking -- and you don't trust
your perceptions of that to hold true for the characters created, but
want a random system to keep you honest. Otherwise, your typical
adventuring party is such a small sample that, statistically speaking,
anything's possible, really.
(I've missed this board. Over on the Buffy discussion boards, they're
just now starting to argue about whether it's "the teller, or the tale."
Sigh.)
More later.
kip
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
John Morrow
>Um, hi. Kip here, whom some of y'all might remember from the Ennead. (If
>not -- long story, short pier. Trust me.) I've been lurking the past
>couple of days with the intent on trying to familiarize myself with the
>current state of the board before leaping in, but this topic caught my
>eye, so here we go, as the angels slink back from the brink, muttering
>under their breaths...
I warned Brian that this was a mine-field via e-mail and I managed to
step into it myself. Ah, well...
[Following is some strong disagreement which is by no means meant to
discourage you from expressing your opinions here.]
>Actually, I'd argue that we don't yet know what genetics dictates as far
>as body strength goes, when broken down into the two broad categories of
>male and female. When based on averages of broad samples of current men
>and women, it's true that men tend to be taller, stronger, and more
>massive. But that's as much due to nurture as nature; the input from each
>isn't known.
Frankly, one can use this type of argument to dismiss anything. As
people have pointed out here in the past, the simple repeatability of
experiments is not a 100% certainty. We never know if the next time
we drop a ball, it won't fall up. But given the billions of data
points that suggest a dropped ball will fall down, I think it is safe
to say that realistically, balls don't fall up. Similarly, given
billions of data points about humans in addition to the very strong
correlation between male hormones and strength (this is why athletes
risk disqualification to take steroids), I think it is safe to say
that the strongest man will be stronger than the strongest woman
without some very noticable mutations.
>A couple of interesting factoids: if people are given an infant to feed,
>and they aren't allowed to check the sex themselves, but are told "This
>is a boy" or "That is a girl," they tend automatically to feed a boy more
>than a girl -- regardless of the actual sex or behavior of the infant. By
>as much as a factor of two to one.
The source of this information?
>Which is interesting when compared
>with the second factoid: in most industrialized countries, average height
>and mass for women is increasing much faster than it is for men, which
>some attribute to the more institutionalized and egalitarian nutrition
>found in daycare and schools.
Again, sources? I'm sorry about being anal about sources but frankly
a lot of material on this subject is -- uh -- loose with the facts.
Feminists, for example, have shown no compunction about claiming that
more men beat their wives on Superbowl Sunday than any other day (no
study was done and data suggests it was false) to claiming that
100,000 women a year die of anorexia (100,000 women a year *may
suffer* from anorexia and only a handful die).
No doubt nutrition is improving and this affects height and mass and
it is entirely possible that more egalitarian feeding is helping women
more than men right now. But there are any number of other possible
explanations for women increasing their height and mass (mass or
muscle mass?) more rapidly including the presence of female growth
hormones in milk and chicken. And there is no reason to believe that
women will catch men with respect to height and muscle mass any more
than there is reason to believe that the average height and mass of
men will increase until they reach planetary proportions.
>Also, the gap between male and female
>sports records -- in general, speaking broadly -- is slowly but surely
>diminishing.
This is no longer true. Recently, women have actually been losing
ground recently. See:
http://sportsci.org/news/news9705/gengap.html
http://member.aol.com/steveslr/gendrgap.htm
http://member.aol.com/steveslr/addtrack.htm
I'm sure you won't like the political commentary and implications of
the articles but if you are going to argue against them, please argue
the facts. Simply put, women's performance was increasing largely due
to steroid (male hormone) use which has been reduced in Olympic
competition.
>In other words, I'm not so sure we can say that genetics dictate that the
>strongest woman can't be as strong as the strongest man. Jury's still out
>on that one. And given that sex and physiology are so damn complicated, I
>think it will end up hung.
The jury is also still out, if you set the bar high enough, on whether
the Easter Bunny exists, too. And some people will always be true
believers. Do you have any reason to believe that the strongest woman
can be as strong as the strongest man or do you simply prefer the
implications of that assumption?
>The topic? Say something about the topic? Oh. The only time I could see a
>random mechanic necessary to give you an approximation of sexual
>dimorphism is when the difference between males and females is different
>than the one you're used to, culturally speaking -- and you don't trust
>your perceptions of that to hold true for the characters created, but
>want a random system to keep you honest. Otherwise, your typical
>adventuring party is such a small sample that, statistically speaking,
>anything's possible, really.
On the basis that "anything's possible", why not give everyone open
ended rolls? After all, isn't it possible that a human could manifest
an IQ like that depicted in the movie Phenomenon (able to learn a
language in an hour)? Isn't it possible that a human could manifest
the strength to lift a car (quite possible if their muscles and bones
were to follow a more ape-like structure). But at what point are you
dealing with a mutant and should random character generation systems
(or even attribute limits) take mutants into account? I'm sorry if I
sound a bit harsh here but "anything's possible" lies at the heart of
most junk science and silly theories.
Here is some other info I found while researching this that you might
find interesting:
http://www.thenation.com/issue/970609/0609ehre.htm
http://medicalreporter.health.org/tmr0699/knee.html
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hsr/hsr/winter97/steroid.html
Frankly, I think this is quickly going to quickly degenerate into
politics which will likely attract the troll crowd involved in
religious and political debates on rec.games.frp.misc. For the
record, my own personal take on the subject is that role-playing games
are generally fantasy so I don't care if the attributes perfectly
model real world ranges or not (heck, I play Champions where women can
lift trucks). I'm only sticking my nose in with respect to reality
because there is as much (if not more) evidence that men and women
have inherent differences as there is that they are interchangible.
John Morrow
John Kim
John Morrow <mor...@eris.io.com> wrote:
>Similarly, given billions of data points about humans in addition to
>the very strong correlation between male hormones and strength (this
>is why athletes risk disqualification to take steroids), I think it
>is safe to say that the strongest man will be stronger than the
>strongest woman without some very noticable mutations.
This is exactly what I said in my earlier post: that a woman
at the genetic limit of strength would be considered abnormal. I
suspect that she would not be easily recognizable as a woman (i.e.
flat-chested, male body type, etc.) Then again, a man at the true
genetic limit for strength would also be considered abnormal.
I think it is a pretty obvious point that when we talk about the
genetic upper limit for strength, we are dealing with noticable
mutations.
Assuming that you are unwilling to do unethical child-
raising experiments, I think the argument of nature versus nurture
is impossible to resolve given today's science. Arguing over
specifics and about theoretical upper limits reveals more about
the politics of the speaker (on both sides) than about the
scientific subject.
My point was that this is (or should be) irrelevant for a
game, unless you are dealing with a truly sex-blind game-world
society. In game terms, I don't see that it matters how much
strength comes from genetic programming versus childhood diet
and exercise. If you want to realistically model the population,
then both of these matter. If you don't, then I don't see the
point in trying to model genetics.
Kip Manley
the moment --
In article <7o6t8n$l44$1...@eris.io.com>,
mor...@eris.io.com (John Morrow) wrote:
> Frankly, one can use this type of argument to dismiss anything. As
> people have pointed out here in the past, the simple repeatability of
> experiments is not a 100% certainty. We never know if the next time
> we drop a ball, it won't fall up.
Actually, I wasn't at all disputing the results -- I was disputing
causation (and thus ultimate potential). We both agree there's a
difference; you ultimately imputed it to male/female genetics; I'm
saying it isn't that simple. For one thing, XX/XY isn't the be-all end-
all of male/female; there's hormones, as well, as you've pointed out,
and those "male" hormones can be naturally present in someone with XX
chromosomes, or vice versa. I'm splitting hairs -- apologies -- but
male/female really isn't a simple dichotomy. That's all.
> The source of this information?
I knew I was going to get into trouble with those. Let me dig. My wife
is at work; Barry's in NYC; I'll have to ask around. And I certainly
agree with how loose a lot of primary sources can be; I was lazy last
night, and now I'm sorry. Sigh. (Damn that Superbowl anecdote; damn
those anorexia deaths.) Will check on the links you provided; danke.
> On the basis that "anything's possible", why not give everyone open
> ended rolls?
By "anything possible," I meant anything within the range of what you
might consider human potential. In other words, the sample group of the
typical adventuring party is so small that it won't mimic the "bell
curve" of the population as a whole, so that a heavily muscled woman --
while unusual, and certainly worth comment -- isn't "impossible"
statistically.
Again, I'm mechanics light, as I think I said. Obviously, common sense
should be paramount; if you've got someone who is arguing that super IQ
is theoretically possible, so it should be allowed, and it's a threat
to game balance, then maybe you need mechanics to rein those folks in.
Again, given how broad the spectrum is, I don't think a dichotomy is
necessary for male vs. female, unless the world one plays in is
different from the "common sense" of the group, and one wants a
mechanic to keep one honest. But that's in a mechanics light
environment. Make sense?
> I'm only sticking my nose in with respect to reality
> because there is as much (if not more) evidence that men and women
> have inherent differences as there is that they are interchangible.
Yup, and it's an inherently political topic -- and thus instant troll
bait. Sigh again. More later.
Psychohist
I think I see what's misleading you.
A character Dodge Chance is determined using DEF. When he
actually goes to dodge, this chance is reduced by the
opponent's DM.
The chart in 12.0 is correct.
I think I'm going to have to start all over again with the combat rules.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
news:7o5nlk$neh$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> A couple of interesting factoids: if people are given an infant to feed,
> and they aren't allowed to check the sex themselves, but are told "This
> is a boy" or "That is a girl," they tend automatically to feed a boy more
> than a girl
Did the source for this happen to mention how boys manage to store this
wonderful boon of higher food energy until they make use of it in their late
teens? They certainly don't make use it until then.
Psychohist
The only time I could see a random mechanic necessary to
give you an approximation of sexual dimorphism is when
the difference between males and females is different
than the one you're used to, culturally speaking
Hm? It strikes me that a random mechanic that doesn't account for sexual
dimorphism is practically guaranteed to be a worse approximation than a random
mechanic that does, for any campaign where sexual dimorphism exists. And
sexual dimorphism certainly exists in the player world, on which the Age of
Heroes rules in this area seem to be at least loosely modelled.
Drop all random factors, and I don't think we'd be talking about anything close
to Age of Heroes any more.
Warren
Psychohist
Did the source for this happen to mention how boys manage to store this
wonderful boon of higher food energy until they make use of it in their late
teens? They certainly don't make use it until then.
Well, it fairly well established that no significant cell division occurs in
voluntary muscles after the age of 6 or so. It appears that having more muscle
cells by age 6 makes muscle building easier later in life.
However, last I checked, it was not clear whether any significant cell division
in these muscles even happens after birth. So feeding differences as an infant
may or may not have any effect.
The item that Kip refers to is more often mentioned in association with
differential rates of infant mortality, with which the causation is more
obvious.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> > Any time strength is added to the requirements, any
> > advantage in dexterity/quickness is more than lost as the
> > woman moves outside the optimal usage curve for her
> > physical structure.
> In other words, the effect of strength outweigh the effects of
> agility.
It's more a matter of agility decreasing as more strength is applied.
Females hit a negative return much quicker for the most part.
In general this results in males will maintaining better/faster control at a
higher percentage of their strength than females can of theirs.
> Very interesting. So the women start out with 1/3 the upper
> body strength of men, but get to about 3/5 by the end of
> basic? Indicating that basic does a lot more for the women ...
> wonder what that implies.
I think little more than women as a rule not engaging in activities that
build strength to the degree men do. One would except a good deal of
improvement in a healthy person starting from a lower personal level of
training.
Brian Gleichman
> I think I'm going to have to start all over again with the combat rules.
I think so.
But don't feel discouraged, I still come across things in them that surprise
me somewhat.
For example, we're considering altering the Solid Strike/Critical damage for
impaling and crushing weapons at the moment after I did some analysis on it
this week. I never looked at it in great detail before since there are by
nature 'crits' and unusual. The benfit of doing the designer notes...
It would be the first major rule change in years. Things are still up in the
air, there are good points to the present methods.
--
By the way, what was the character you generated like?
Psychohist
in most industrialized countries, average height and mass
for women is increasing much faster than it is for men,
which some attribute to the more institutionalized and
egalitarian nutrition found in daycare and schools.
John Morrow posts, in part:
Again, sources? I'm sorry about being anal about sources
but frankly a lot of material on this subject is -- uh --
loose with the facts.
First, John, I'd like to mention that I'm mostly in agreement with you -
especially about the fact that data does exist, and one can learn more by
sifting through it than by ignoring it.
On this particular issue, I don't have references, but I've seen articles
mentioning this trend in Japan, and it's been confirmed first hand by my
father, who has spent a significant amount of time there over the decades.
This has been attributed mostly to the increase in animal protein in the diet.
It should be noted that the chance has affected male heights quite strongly,
too: the men are still taller than the women, though the gap has narrowed.
I checked out the articles that you mentioned, and they seem to point to the
same general trend: thirty years ago, there was a big gender gap, which has
narrowed for many reasons. But, even without controlling for the effect of
steroids, the gap seems to be asymptotically approaching a nonzero value. It
should also be noted that the apparent negative effect of stricter drug
enforcement is very small compared with the gains women have made to date.
Heck, it was possible to see this even before the fact. Back in 1980, when I
was putting my rules together, I investigated weightlifting championship
statistics, and I recently came across my notes. The winning lifts for men
were all closely grouped as a multiple of the person's weight (within 10%),
which indicated to me that the men were getting pretty close to a theoretical
limit. For women, the same statistic varied by more than a factor of two,
suggesting that the women's competition was sufficiently small or uncompetitive
to allow people to win who were nowhere near their physical limits.
I think both sides of the discussion about 'genetic limits' is a little
disingenuous: these limits are not a single hard number.
For example, I use a ST scale of 3-18 for both men and women. At first glance,
this might indicate that my system reflects the view that "the theoretical
maximum is the same for men as for women".
However, the probabilities are different. There's one chance in 216 of a male
character having a ST of 18, and that's included at least one player character
over the last 20 years. There's only one chance in 7776 of a female character
having a ST of 18, which makes it unlikely that a player character ever will.
I would be interested in whether you think this is a reasonable approach. (The
tails are too thick in both cases, and I should allow the ST to be more mutable
as a result of training, but those are other issues.)
Frankly, I think this is quickly going to quickly degenerate into
politics which will likely attract the troll crowd involved in
religious and political debates on rec.games.frp.misc.
Hasn't yet. Maybe learning to be open minded about roleplaying games on rgfa
helps in being open minded about other issues, too.
I'm only sticking my nose in with respect to reality
because there is as much (if not more) evidence that men and women
have inherent differences as there is that they are interchangible.
Thanks for sticking your nose in. I don't think many would argue that they are
completely interchangeable.
Warren
Psychohist
Gleichman posts, in part:
I think little more than women as a rule not engaging in activities that
build strength to the degree men do. One would except a good deal of
improvement in a healthy person starting from a lower personal level of
training.
Well, I find that interesting. But this doesn't necessarily reflect the
general population (although it might) - it could also mean that the
recruitment base is more heavily selected for those already physically inclined
among the men than among the women.
Warren
Psychohist
system.
I didn't get very far, actually. I just left the attributes as they were
rolled, rather than shifting them around, because I didn't have any clue which
ones went well together.
I then decided I wanted to know more about the combat system before assigning
character points. That led to the recent discussion on the system, which put
me back to square one as far as that was concerned.
I have a question about the 0 point option to be "average size", though - does
it mean I reroll these until I get something in the average range, does it put
the character at the exact center of the average range, or can I choose
anything in the average range?
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> However, the probabilities are different. There's one chance
> in 216 of a male character having a ST of 18, and that's
> included at least one player character over the last 20 years.
> There's only one chance in 7776 of a female character
> having a ST of 18, which makes it unlikely that a player
> character ever will.
>
> I would be interested in whether you think this is a reasonable
> approach.
This was directed at John Morrow, but I can't resist.
No, I don't consider it reasonable. It won't be reasonable until there is at
least one unenhanced women who can play at the level of the top men in
weight lifting.
Until then, it is based not upon existing player world facts, but upon
statistical prediction. Such theories have nearly always been proven false
in reality as they fail to account for negative effects, always assuming
things will continue as they have.
You risk the same mistakes of the 60-70s population growth estimates.
Indeed, given the history of such 'predictions', you are almost assured of
it.
In any case, since such a strong women does not exist and has never existed-
you are in violation of SOD in relation to the real world.
Of course, maybe women are just built difference in your world than ours.
Brian Gleichman
> I have a question about the 0 point option to be "average size", though -
does
> it mean I reroll these until I get something in the average range, does it
put
> the character at the exact center of the average range, or can I choose
> anything in the average range?
Exact center for the calculating any of the distinctive characteristic
traits.
But as it's states in section 3.4.2, this is your idea effective weight.
Actual weight can vary slightly from this, but just doesn't effect anything.
This option by the way was intended to allow an easy out for those players
that had a good concept blown out of the water by a bad size roll. Most of
these concepts can live with an average far better than being too small or
too big.
Brian Gleichman
> Well, I find that interesting. But this doesn't necessarily reflect the
> general population (although it might) - it could also mean that the
> recruitment base is more heavily selected for those already physically
inclined
> among the men than among the women.
Maybe. But I know a lot of shrimps in the military. And then there's always
the 'fat farm'. Also I would imagine that the most physically inclined men
are in athletics removing them from consideration.
I don't know of any similar studies for the general population. There is
little reason to do them and the present climate in research almost prevents
it in any case. It's not PC.
John Kim
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Warren Dew <psych...@aol.com> wrote
>> However, the probabilities are different. There's one chance
>> in 216 of a male character having a ST of 18, and that's
>> included at least one player character over the last 20 years.
>> There's only one chance in 7776 of a female character
>> having a ST of 18, which makes it unlikely that a player
>> character ever will.
>No, I don't consider it reasonable. It won't be reasonable until there
>is at least one unenhanced women who can play at the level of the top
>men in weight lifting. Until then, it is based not upon existing
>player world facts, but upon statistical prediction.
Just to throw in my two cents... I would say that it pretty
clearly depends on the campaign world. If this was a campaign set
in historical Earth, then I think that this would be inappropriate...
If the 1 in 7776 chance _did_ come up with me as GM, then I would
probably veto it as unrealistic.
On the other hand, if it was in a fantasy game, I would
need to have more world detail to take into account. Depending on
the world, anything is possible.
The case where I would have to carefully consider would
be if I defined that the campaign world had identical genetics/biology
to the real world, but had different society such that women were
raised and encouraged to athletics and physical strength as much or
more than men. I suspect that in such a campaign I would neglect
the physical dimorphism. There is certainly a genetic difference
in physical potential, but I think it is significantly less than the
gap in 1990's data. Between the statistical error of PC's and the
inherent error of a game, I don't think it is worth representing.
My rule of thumb is that I should expect systematic errors of at
least 25% in any game situation, so effects less that 15% or so
are just not worth representing.
-*-*-*-
Warren Dew <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
Re: John Morrow's citation of sport's study
"http://sportsci.org/news/news9705/gengap.html"
>
>I checked out the articles that you mentioned, and they seem to point
>to the same general trend: thirty years ago, there was a big gender
>gap, which has narrowed for many reasons. But, even without controlling
>for the effect of steroids, the gap seems to be asymptotically approaching
>a nonzero value.
The data on the gender gap over time is clear. The political
part comes from Seiler and Sailer's conclusion that the cause of the
rise and fall of the gender gap since the 1960's is largely due to
steroid use rather than other factors. Since they have no quantitative
assessment of _any_ of the potential factors (steroid or otherwise), I
put no credence in their conclusion.
Brian Gleichman
news:7ocpr2$8...@news.service.uci.edu...
> Just to throw in my two cents... I would say that it pretty
> clearly depends on the campaign world.
I already stated this.
Warren however has said repeatedly that he bases his world on the real one
for the most part. It was from this perceptive that I answered his request
for an opinion (and frankly, I can't imagine why he'd ask for an opinion
otherwise).
> The case where I would have to carefully consider would
> be if I defined that the campaign world had identical
> genetics/biology to the real world, but had different society
> such that women were raised and encouraged to athletics and
> physical strength as much or more than men. I suspect that in
> such a campaign I would neglect the physical dimorphism.
And you base this "I suspect" on what? A simple statistical growth curve
that is going flat like all simple statistical growth curves do?
Paul Erlich would be proud of you. Although the tens of millions that didn't
die in the eighties might think you laughable.
Lev Lafayette
>Kip Manley <kipm...@yahoo.com> writes:
(rm)
>>A couple of interesting factoids: if people are given an infant to feed,
>>and they aren't allowed to check the sex themselves, but are told "This
>>is a boy" or "That is a girl," they tend automatically to feed a boy more
>>than a girl -- regardless of the actual sex or behavior of the infant. By
>>as much as a factor of two to one.
>The source of this information?
Any half decent Intro to Psych or Gender Studies should have that. Those
particular experiments are *so* well known, one shouldn't *have* to dig up
the references for you...
>>Which is interesting when compared
>>with the second factoid: in most industrialized countries, average height
>>and mass for women is increasing much faster than it is for men, which
>>some attribute to the more institutionalized and egalitarian nutrition
>>found in daycare and schools.
>Again, sources? I'm sorry about being anal about sources but frankly
>a lot of material on this subject is -- uh -- loose with the facts.
>Feminists, for example, have shown no compunction about claiming that
>more men beat their wives on Superbowl Sunday than any other day (no
>study was done and data suggests it was false) to claiming that
>100,000 women a year die of anorexia (100,000 women a year *may
>suffer* from anorexia and only a handful die).
Whilst I have no doubt that misinterpretation occurs to satisfy an
ideological point, and usually in the style of "Chinese whispers" eg., a
feminist academic does a study which an underling does an interpretative
analysis, which is taken up by the maintsream media and ka-pow! Before you
know it there's a rumour running around that has nothing to do with the
original facts.... However
In the example above, there was a compiled study done in the mid-1960s (I'm
sorry I can't give you the exact reference, but I'm at work and my books
ain't here...) which combined medical studies of menarche (first menstruation).
This was an "advanced western capitalist" study, including Norway, Denmark,
Great Britian, the United States, and I think France as well. Anyway the
crux of the study showed a decrease of first menarche in the 1850s from an
average age of 18.5 to the early 1960s of around 13.
The *empirical* fact is a substantial decrease in the onset of physical
maturity. A *rational* interpretation is that this is due to improved health
and nutrition. The claim that this onset of physical maturity is greater in
women than in men I cannot (having not seen comparative texts) substantiate.
I'll take off the academic theorist hat now <g>...
Regarde,
Lev Lafayette. l...@ariel.unimelb.edu.au http://ariel.unimelb.edu.au/~lev
* Electorate Officer for Keilor District, Parliament of Victoria
* Thesis in progress: 'A Social Theory of the Internet'. Ashworth Centre
for Social Theory, University of Melbourne.
--
Lev Lafayette. l...@ariel.unimelb.edu.au http://ariel.unimelb.edu.au/~lev
* Electorate Officer for Keilor District, Parliament of Victoria
* Thesis in progress: 'A Social Theory of the Internet'. Ashworth Centre
for Social Theory, University of Melbourne.
Geoff Wedig
> So I guess it depends upon what type of dance we are speaking of.
> Offhand, I can't think of any that require much upper body strength.
Well, there's always Capoiera (sp?), which is both dance and Martial Arts,
but that's debatable. I imagine some forms of Modern Dance include similar
levels of Gymnastics, though.
Still, that wasn't your main point, so just ignore me. ;)
Geoff
John Kim
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>John Kim <jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu> wrote:
>> I would say that it pretty clearly depends on the campaign world.
>
>I already stated this.
>
>Warren however has said repeatedly that he bases his world on the
I guess I mis-spoke a little. By "campaign world" I meant
setting: including time and culture. That is, for me it would matter
whether a game was set in 1990's Europe versus, say, 1500's China.
Both of these are "the real world", but will have very different
probability distributions of physical abilities, including a
different gender gap. Depending on which the fantasy setting was
closer to would change the restrictions I would have on female PCs.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>> [...] the campaign world had identical genetics/biology to
>> the real world, but had different society such that women were
>> raised and encouraged to athletics and physical strength as much
>> or more than men. I suspect that in such a campaign I would
>> neglect the physical dimorphism.
>
>And you base this "I suspect" on what? A simple statistical growth
>curve that is going flat like all simple statistical growth curves do?
>
>Paul Erlich would be proud of you. Although the tens of millions that
>didn't die in the eighties might think you laughable.
Well, first of all, it's a *game*. I think you're letting
your politics get away with you here. In any case, what exactly is
your alternative that is (presumably) non-laughable? That the gender
gap in such a society will be exactly the same as in the 1990's Earth?
What scientific basis would you have for deciding that?
Brian Gleichman
> Well, first of all, it's a *game*. I think you're letting
> your politics get away with you here.
I'm letting a distaste of improper science and poor logic run away with me.
If you want to call that political, feel free.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that people will ignore real life realities
in a game because they what to. You may do as you wish. But please, don't
attempt to justify the decision to remove physical performance gender gaps
as 'reality based science'.
> In any case, what exactly is your alternative that is
> (presumably) non-laughable? That the gender gap in such a
> society will be exactly the same as in the 1990's Earth?
I've made no such claim outside my own campaign, and I've even stated these
are unrealistic due to the positive modifiers I've given.
However IF you are interested in using real world data, you'd be hard
pressed to find any reasonable scientific data outside the modern era. If
you have any, especially on mortality rates by age, let me know.
Besides, there is much to recommend examining 1990 Earth.
Depending on which groups you take you data from, late 1980 to early 1990
certainly displays the lowest scientifically measured gender gap in human
history (the gap is growing larger in late 90's).
It is also possible to look at cultures with much higher gender gaps across
an of range of life styles including those with very low tolerance of female
physical effort.
This provides a good upper limit and a varieties of lower limits for use.
You just pick those sub-groups closest to your fantasy culture.
Exceeding either the upper or lower limit is an unproven assumption and
should be admitted to up front without the statistical smoke and mirrors
common to so many pseudo-science books.
John Kim
>> (presumably) non-laughable? That the gender gap in such a
>> society will be exactly the same as in the 1990's Earth?
>
>I've made no such claim outside my own campaign, and I've even stated
>these are unrealistic due to the positive modifiers I've given.
Brian, you *did* make such a claim by stating that my
neglecting the gender gap (in a fictional society where women were
encouraged to athletics as much as men) was "laughable".
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>Depending on which groups you take you data from, late 1980 to early
>1990 certainly displays the lowest scientifically measured gender gap
>in human history (the gap is growing larger in late 90's).
>
>It is also possible to look at cultures with much higher gender gaps
>across an of range of life styles including those with very low tolerance
>of female physical effort.
>
>This provides a good upper limit and a varieties of lower limits for
>use. You just pick those sub-groups closest to your fantasy culture.
>
>Exceeding either the upper or lower limit is an unproven assumption and
>should be admitted to up front without the statistical smoke and mirrors
>common to so many pseudo-science books.
I think it is important to distinguish between reality and
speculative fiction here. Any claim whatsoever that you make about
a fantasy society is an "unproven assumption". Just because there
is good data about the modern era doesn't mean that this data can
or should apply to fictional societies. I would say that there is
much more "smoke and mirrors" involved in trying to justify
scientific accuracy where there is none.
Inherently, if you have a fictional society you may be
extrapolating beyond the bounds of data on 1990's Earth. If one
hypothesize some matriarchal Amazon society where men are chattel,
it is just as much an unproven assumption to say that the gender gap
corresponds to (say) the 1990's U.S. as to extrapolate otherwise.
Speculative fiction about fantasy worlds is *not* science
regardless of how much real-world data you collect. Research is
good and useful, but sooner or later you are going to have to guess
about things. There is no scientific data on how bronth meat
affects childhood growth, or what magical healing does to infant
mortality.
Kevin R. Hardwick
says...
>
>You risk the same mistakes of the 60-70s population growth estimates.
>Indeed, given the history of such 'predictions', you are almost assured of
>it.
This is a request for information, rather than a post staking out a position.
It clearly is the case that the men and women have slightly different physical
capacities, stemming from hormonal and structural differences in anatomy.
Regardless of cultural factors, it seems very likely that nature *does*
play a role here. I've heard that casually expressed as about a 10% difference
in ability among the most fit and capable sectors of the population (depending
on what capacity we are talking about--in some physical capacities women are
more capable than men, eg. resistance to disease and stress, ability to
withstand hunger, life-expectancy, ability to withstand G-forces, etc.) Thus,
at the theoretical extreme, way way out on the tail of the population
distribution, men will be about 10% faster, 10% stronger, etc. Let me first
begin by asking whether or not this is aproximately true, or have I been
egregiously misinformed?
Second, what is the situation when we are not several standard deviations out
on the tail of the curve? What happens when we compare women to men more or
less in the middle of the population curve? After all, for rpg purposes what
happens out at the extremes is less important.
Speaking as an historian, I can cite market data that, presumably, roughly
reflects inherent physical gender differences. In the 19th century south, both
male and female slaves performed plantation labor. The market evaluated a
physically fit young woman as being able to perform about 3/4 as much physical
labor as a physically fit young man. Plantation managers would routinely
equate the labor of an adult woman as 3/4 that of an adult man, and this was
also to some degree reflected in market prices for slaves. Now granted, a
variety of factors went into that evaluation (lactating women, for example, had
to be given time to breast-feed infants), but nonetheless it was to a large
degree based on the variant capacity of men and women to perform a given amount
of hard physical labor. This data would seem to indicate that in the middle of
the curve the difference is more like 25% than 10%.
What happens when we factor malnourishment into the situation? For much of
human history--all but the most recent eras--human populations have been, as a
rule, malnourished. This is reflected, for example, in the height and weight
of medieval and early modern populations. Does a man who has been chronically
malnourished, such that his growth is stunted, still perform at a 10% (or 25%,
or whatever) physical edge over a woman who has been chronically malnourished?
I have not looked into it, but I would guess that the historical data I've just
cited is fraught with a variety of potential problems. It is tempting to take
the historical facts as I have cited them (they are uncontroversial) and apply
them to this problem, but in practice sorting out the cultural bias in the data
is tricky and perhaps impossible. This issue surely has been the topic of
more recent study, by the military if by no one else--can anyone cite the
research?
Best,
Kevin
Brian Gleichman
> Brian, you *did* make such a claim by stating that my
> neglecting the gender gap (in a fictional society where women were
> encouraged to athletics as much as men) was "laughable".
You entered the requirement of "identical genetics/biology
to the real world". That means, to my mind "identical genetics/biology to
the real world" with all that implies. That is, WE DON'T MAKE STUFF UP.
Now if you had stated "identical genetics/biology except where I've made the
following changes (insert lack of gender gap details) due to acceptance of
unproven social theories", you wouldn't have heard from me.
> I think it is important to distinguish between reality and
> speculative fiction here.
I think it would have been better to have stated you had a fictional
requirement up front without bringing in any pseudo-science.
Now that I know yours is a fictional world with a required specific
disconnect from our reality, there is no need for further comment. Have fun.
John R. Snead
: John Kim <jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu> wrote in message
: news:7ohrcf$i...@news.service.uci.edu...
:> Brian, you *did* make such a claim by stating that my
:> neglecting the gender gap (in a fictional society where women were
:> encouraged to athletics as much as men) was "laughable".
: You entered the requirement of "identical genetics/biology
: to the real world". That means, to my mind "identical genetics/biology to
: the real world" with all that implies. That is, WE DON'T MAKE STUFF UP.
: Now if you had stated "identical genetics/biology except where I've made the
: following changes (insert lack of gender gap details) due to acceptance of
: unproven social theories", you wouldn't have heard from me.
:> I think it is important to distinguish between reality and
:> speculative fiction here.
: I think it would have been better to have stated you had a fictional
: requirement up front without bringing in any pseudo-science.
Apologies if another version of this message shows up, my newsreader just
acted up.
Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule about identical
biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal society where women received
better nutrition than men and where women were the only ones to receive
extensive physical training? In such a society it would seem perfectly
reasonable for average for female physical strength to be greater than the
male average.
In some strongly male-dominated societies it is clear that physical gender
differences are considerably greater than those found in US 1980s/90s
data. It seems equally reasonable that in a equally strongly
female-dominated society that physical gender differences would be equally
divergent from the 1980s/90s data, but in the other direction. If the
differences in nutrition and activity were strong enough I see no reason
why in that culture an average woman would not be significantly stronger
than an average man.
As a guide, since WWII improved nutrition has meant that in Japan people
born within the past 40 years are 4 or 5 inches (IIRC) taller than people
born prior to WWII. Consider what a society would be like where men had a
level of nutrition equal to pre-war Japan and women and level of nutrition
equal to post-war Japan. Now add in the fact that in this society men are
discouraged from engaging in strenuous physical activity and most women
are given at least some training as warriors. We have a society of
earth-normal humans whose culture has resulted in women being on average
larger and stronger than men. No pseudo-science, no alternate biology
required, merely a different culture. How that socity evolved in the
first place would be another issue, but given the various cultural
oddities which our own world has produced, I certainly would not say that
such a culture was impossible.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
Brian Gleichman
news:7ojjq0$j...@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com...
> Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule about identical
> biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal society
Because it's never happened and there's no factual foundation to indicate it
can ever happen.
John Kim
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>John Kim <jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu> wrote:
>> Brian, you *did* make such a claim by stating that my neglecting
>> the gender gap (in a fictional society where women were encouraged
>> to athletics as much as men) was "laughable".
>
>You entered the requirement of "identical genetics/biology to the real
>world". That means, to my mind "identical genetics/biology to the
>real world" with all that implies. That is, WE DON'T MAKE STUFF UP.
Hm. Let's try dropping the gender issue for a moment and
addressing the methodology problem. Your criteria seems to be that
unless something happened in the modern era of real-world Earth
(i.e. so it was well-measured), it isn't realistic -- regardless of
the hypothesized conditions. I am curious about how far this extends.
Let's suppose that I have a science fiction game set on a
future Earth where medicine has dramatically improved (but assume
no genetic engineering of humans). Now, the question is, should I
use 1990's rates of infant mortality and lifespan, or should I
postulate some improvement? By your criteria (as I understand it)
postulating any improvement would be making stuff up and thus be
laughably unrealistic.
Let's take another case. Suppose I have a game set in
real-world England circa 1200 during a period of famine. I want to
represent the difference in stats between malnourished peasants and
well-fed (and meat-eating) nobles. Suppose I use modern data from
one decade/country for the nobles, and a different decade/country
for the peasants -- since I cannot find any comparable aristocracy.
Would this be reasonable?
John R. Snead
: John R. Snead <jsn...@netcom16.netcom.com> wrote in message
: news:7ojjq0$j...@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com...
"Can happen" in what sense? Such a society certainly seems possible in
the purely physical sense. If conditions are made extreme enough women
can be considerably more fit than men. Do you mean that this type of
society is impossible culturally?
Also, as mentioned in another post, what about a seriously stratified
society like Sparta? In Sparta IIRC ~10% of the population were citizens
who all received combat training (men and women both) while 90% of the
population were oppressed, Helot slaves whose standards of nutrition and
training were radically inferior. I would expect that the ratio between a
the strength of a female Spartan and a male Helot to be notably different
than that found between late 20th century women and men.
Also, in many highly stratified (but less extreme than Sparta) societies
nutrition standards varied enormously based on class. Given some of the
figures I've seen on relative lifespan, height, and similar figures (I'll
dig out references if you want) lower class men were certainly notably
less fit and strong than upper class men and were (at minimum) not much
stronger than upper class women. In such societies class and gender
would both seem to be necessary variables for determining physical stats.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
David Alex Lamb
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>John R. Snead <jsn...@netcom16.netcom.com> wrote in message
>news:7ojjq0$j...@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com...
>
>> Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule about identical
>> biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal society
>
>Because it's never happened and there's no factual foundation to indicate it
>can ever happen.
I guesss I'm having trouble understanding the intensity of your opposition
here, Brian. I'm also having trouble figuring out what to say to continue the
thread. Are you saying that biology and genetics, as we currently understand
them, mean that matriarchal societies cannot arise at all? or just the
hypothesized ones in which the males are differentially malnourished, leading
to average females being stronger?
--
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~dalamb/
Brian Gleichman
news:7okofl$3up$1...@knot.queensu.ca...
> I guesss I'm having trouble understanding the intensity of your
> opposition here, Brian. I'm also having trouble figuring out
> what to say to continue the thread.
I don't think there's any need to continue the thread.
I'm going to try to state this as clear as I can once more, and then I'm
dropping it.
Players of role-playing games will (and indeed must) play loose with the
entire range of human knowledge and logic. They are free to do so.
What I object to is the use of pseudo-science in an attempt to prove that
such things either exist or will exist in the real world.
SOD is one thing. It's quite another to see people actually believe that
real life gender gaps don't 'really' exist (or would cease to exist given a
better social order) or that giant anime mecha will be the combatant of
choice on the future battle field.
Pseudo-science explanations should be admitted up front for what they are:
background fluff to aid SOD, not a true reflection of reality.
Kip Manley
a smidgen of credibility to the infant feeding study I cited, which I
myself have been too busy (or lazy; much the same thing) to track down.
And for pointing out that the conclusion which I drew -- and, I would
take great pains to point out, all the other conclusions drawn about the
evidence cited -- is nothing more than an attempt to somewhat logically
rationalize a cause for the cited effects. Let's go over this again,
folks -- NOBODY (to my knowledge) is denying there's a measurable gap in
performance between statistically significant samples of males and
females; what we're quibbling over is what causes this gap, and what it
means as far as the potential of individual specimens, and whether or not
one or another political ideology is blinding us to the glaring, obvious
truth.
In other words, we're debating the usual crap.
Brian Gleichman wrote:
Kip Manley wrote:
> A couple of interesting factoids: if people are given an
> infant to feed...
Did the source for this happen to mention how boys manage to
store this wonderful boon of higher food energy until they make
use of it in their late teens? They certainly don't make use it
until then.
Since bad science and wooly-headed thinking annoy Mr. Gleichman so much,
we can assume he doesn't mean to suggest that infant nutrition has no
bearing on future development. Did it not occur that, rather than females
being fed enough, and males fed more than enough, that females might
perhaps have been underfed by the study's subjects? And that this might
have an effect on later development, which effect would be mitigated in
other circumstances, where the amount of food is dictated by an objective
rather than subjective scale?
Granted, this is all speculation. But it makes sense, and is an
intriguing possibility for explaining the shrinking gender gap -- not
just in sports records, which are a distorted measure of the performance
of your average human, but in overall average weights and heights, where
the gap in your basic industrialized, well-off nation is shrinking and
continues to shrink. Which is not to say that there isn't another
explanation; just that I like this one. And given the lack of
desirability of female infants in many countries, and the resentment
thereof (China and India leap to mind as broad examples), it's one I can
believe all too readily. Any other hypotheses to explain the shrinking
gaps in height and weight?
Lev Lafayette wrote, regarding the onset of menarche:
The *empirical* fact is a substantial decrease in the onset of
physical maturity. A *rational* interpretation is that this is
due to improved health and nutrition. The claim that this onset
of physical maturity is greater in women than in men I cannot
(having not seen comparative texts) substantiate.
Not so much a claim that women are maturing earlier than men -- though
girls do mature faster than boys, or so the old saw would have us believe
-- than that the onset of objective, institutional programs of infant and
child nutrition might serve to help explain the corresponding shrinkage
in gender gap in height, weight, and, yes, sports records. There's a
POSSIBLE correlation there; the implications are interesting, and (to me,
at least) give pause when considering current subjective notions of the
gender gap, how wide it is, and what causes it -- and what bearing it
might have on the potential of an individual man or woman.
Kevin R. Hardwick wrote:
Thus, at the theoretical extreme, way way out on the tail of
the population distribution, men will be about 10% faster, 10%
stronger, etc. Let me first begin by asking whether or not
this is approximately true, or have I been egregiously
misinformed?
I haven't heard the 10% figure myself, but it strikes me as an
exceedingly anecdotal figure, and thus suspect. I highly doubt that
differences in performance are equally distributed, across the board, for
all types of activity. There's the fact that women overall tend to have
more stamina than men overall, for instance; men overall tend to be
better in sprints and lifting huge weights for brief periods of time.
There are also, if I recall correctly, interesting suggestions that women
can bear a lot more pain than men, though this is such a highly
subjective area I have to wonder how anyone begins to measure it...
In the 19th century south, both male and female slaves
performed plantation labor. The market evaluated a physically
fit young woman as being able to perform about 3/4 as much
physical labor as a physically fit young man...
While this is a fascinating attempt to provide an objective window on the
situation, I'd have to say that the cultural biases of the 19th century
are such that it renders the valuation unusable.
Does a man who has been chronically malnourished, such that his
growth is stunted, still perform at a 10% (or 25%, or whatever)
physical edge over a woman who has been chronically
malnourished?
An interesting question, but it assumes the level of malnourishment is
equal for males and females. I would imagine in most historical cases
that males tended to get the better end of the bargain, which would skew
performance towards their end of the gap.
And, again, Brian Gleichman wrote:
John R. Snead wrote:
> Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule about
> identical biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal society
Because it's never happened and there's no factual foundation
to indicate it can ever happen.
One (being me) is tempted to start spouting off about the Great
Matriarchy which ruled Mother Africa and the Eurasian continent before
the Aryans came galloping down from wherever-the-hell and threw all our
Venuses into the Willendorf trash-heap -- but attempting to win an
argument by inciting a stroke in the other party is generally considered
to be bad form. Let's all agree that Graves's "White Goddess" matriarchy
is a lovely idea utterly unsubstantiated in anything resembling cold,
hard fact, and move on, shall we?
One is next tempted to cite Greek legends of the Amazons, but won't,
because -- as there's little more than legend to go on -- they're
terribly problematic as hard and fast evidence which can be historically
situated.
One could bring up the Central Asian "Amazons," archeological evidence of
which is being unearthed even as we speak; but very little is known or
has been inferred about them beyond their undoubted existence, and
besides, there's the immediately obvious problem that -- if the Central
Asian "Amazons" indeed lived in female-only tribes -- women living by
themselves isn't really a matriarchy, since they aren't dominating men.
One could bring up any number of cases, where the split between male and
female spheres of power is sharp, and where judgment calls are required
to begin to determine who has more power, males or females (certain
African and Native American tribes leap to mind -- sans names,
unfortunately; damn my memory) -- but one is hard-pressed to find a clear
example of a "matriarchy" here. Still, the degree to which lines are
blurred is intriguingly suggestive...
(One wonders if Mr. Gleichman is familiar with the so-called "men's
rights" movement in the States, and their arguments that we currently
live in a matriarchy -- citing health and happiness statistics [generally
skewed towards women's advantage rather than men's], and pointing out
that for the longest time women didn't have to work, while men turned
over all their salaries to women -- but one assumes Mr. Gleichman
wouldn't lend their silly, distorted arguments much credence at all. One
also wonders whether -- given that "matriarchy" means "rule by mothers"
in its literal sense -- he is familiar with the stereotypical cultural
power of Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, or the mothers of the American
South, white or black -- but these are trivial points, and one is
starting to get a bit silly.)
No, instead one turns to the islands off the coast of Korea, where much
of the economy is based on diving for various forms of shellfish, and
where -- as the waters are so cold, and as women tend to have a thicker
layer of subcutaneous fat than men, larger lung capacities, and more
stamina -- women do the diving, and are thus in control of the primary
means of production for the community. On a number of these islands, we
see some fascinating reversals: men raise the children, keep house, and
spend most of their time gossiping with each other (in taverns, granted)
about how cold and unfeeling their wives are; the women bring home the
shellfish and bitch about how their houses aren't clean, and about how
their men are silly and impractical. Of further interest -- there's a
shamanic role in Korean folk religion filled most often by women; on
these islands, the role is instead taken by men.
There. A matriarchy. Still in existence in the 1970s, as far as I know;
Lord only knows what's become of them since.
I agree: bad science and wooly-headedness are to be strenuously fought
wherever they are encountered, and critical thinking is in sadly short
supply these days. But when one finds oneself making statements that a
matriarchy has "never happened AND THERE'S NO FACTUAL FOUNDATION TO
INDICATE IT CAN EVER HAPPEN," (emphasis added) -- well, one has abandoned
critical thinking, and toppled over the other side of the debate.
But. To get back to the topic at hand -- the bearing this idea has on
random generation of statistics for characters:
Psychohist wrote:
Kip Manley posts, in part:
> The only time I could see a random mechanic necessary to
> give you an approximation of sexual dimorphism is when
> the difference between males and females is different
> than the one you're used to, culturally speaking
Hm? It strikes me that a random mechanic that doesn't account
for sexual dimorphism is practically guaranteed to be a worse
approximation than a random mechanic that does, for any
campaign where sexual dimorphism exists.
Well, it has to do with the fact that the gender gap is most noted at the
extremes -- there are extremes that men can reach that women can't,
without aid of hormones and steroids (and why does that make them less
female? Anybody bitching about how "unnatural" Mark McGwire's strength
is?) -- and that, while there's a gap between the performance of men and
women ON AVERAGE, for just about any spot on the bell curve, you will
find both men AND women represented -- except, as noted, where we get to
the freakish extremes of Olympic athletes. Given how granular most
character stat systems are, and given that your average gaming campaign
rarely rolls up a statistically significant number of characters, it just
doesn't matter.
Yes, not having a weighting mechanic for sexual dimorphism is less
accurate than having one -- but at the level of most campaigns, one will
never notice the difference. (Unless one spends a lot of time rolling up
hundreds of characters to see what might happen.) And given that the
topic is highly charged, freighted with great personal and political
significance for a lot of people -- and given that measurements of the
gap are and have been subject to all sorts of cultural bias, and so are
suspect, and so make statistical derivations of that gap themselves
suspect -- why bother? Unless you've got a strange, counter-intuitive
situation, like Mr. Snead's hypothetical Spartan Amazons, or those Korean
fishing villages, and you want to use the weighting mechanism to keep
people honest, who might otherwise make assumptions based on their own
ideas of the gender gap, which are inaccurate for the situation at hand.
If you want to model the freakish end of things, you might do what AD&D
did, with that percentile strength over and above the flat 18, say, and
limit the upper registers to men only. But anything above and beyond that
courts heated argument and disagreement and accusations and counter-
accusations, and is probably the first mechanism to be chopped out in a
home-brew version. Again: why bother?
But this is from someone who'd chop all the mechanics out, so you
probably shouldn't listen to me, anyway.
One last request -- we've been pretty good about it so far, but it's
still crept in, here and there. Given that the term "politically correct"
is a semantically null buzz phrase, can we please dispense with it
utterly -- in this discussion, at least? Thanks.
kip
"So all of you young gentlemen and all of you young ladies
I pray you'll take a warning and listen well to me
Never dare to make a sport of, ridicule or laugh at
The people who are not afraid to fear the powers that be."
-- Brian Dewan, "The Letter"
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
John Kim
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>Players of role-playing games will (and indeed must) play loose with
>the entire range of human knowledge and logic. They are free to do so.
>What I object to is the use of pseudo-science in an attempt to prove
>that such things either exist or will exist in the real world.
Um, Brian? Given that this is true, who are you arguing
with, and specifically what pseudo-science are they using? I have
made quite clear in my posts that what I am talking about was how
I would handle things in a *game*.
For the purposes of a fantasy/sci-fi game one often has
to speculate beyond the range of real-world data. I certainly
don't think that anything is proven by this, and I am mystified
as to how you could read my posts any other way.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>SOD is one thing. It's quite another to see people actually believe
>that real life gender gaps don't 'really' exist (or would cease to
>exist given a better social order) or that giant anime mecha will
>be the combatant of choice on the future battle field.
Note: What are you defining as a "better social order"?
That's a new term to me in the debate. I mentioned a fantasy
matriarchy where men are oppressed and other possibile societies,
but I certainly never described these as "better", nor would I.
I did say that if I postulated a game-world society where
women were encouraged to athletics as much as men, that for game
purposes I would probably neglect the gender gap. I also defined
this as meaning I thought that it would be less than 20%, since
for my games I neglect many effects of the 10-20% level. This
could easily be wrong -- but running an RPG isn't rocket science.
If this offends your politics or your science, then please state
with scientific proof what the gap should be in such a society,
and I would use that instead.
John R. Snead
: I'm going to try to state this as clear as I can once more, and then I'm
: dropping it.
: Players of role-playing games will (and indeed must) play loose with the
: entire range of human knowledge and logic. They are free to do so.
: What I object to is the use of pseudo-science in an attempt to prove that
: such things either exist or will exist in the real world.
: SOD is one thing. It's quite another to see people actually believe that
: real life gender gaps don't 'really' exist (or would cease to exist given a
: better social order) or that giant anime mecha will be the combatant of
: choice on the future battle field.
: Pseudo-science explanations should be admitted up front for what they are:
: background fluff to aid SOD, not a true reflection of reality.
Would you consider any of the ideas I presented about female-dominated
societies to be based in pseudo-science? Also, after thinking about these
issues for a while it occurs to me that if someone wishes to go into the
level of detail to modify stats by gender also modifying stats by social
class in societies which have serious nutritional and activity differences
based on social class. I would expect that such modifiers would normally
be to physical strength and to whatever stat or stats cover constitution,
endurance, and stamina.
-John Snead jsn...@netcom.com
Brian Gleichman
news:7ollcq$nnn$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Mr. Manley finally comes to the point after beating around the bush forever
with near fantasy examples with a Korea 'Matriarchy'.
Note that I never stated that Matriarchy can't exist, but that Matriarchy of
the type that reverses the real world gender gap have never existed.
> There. A matriarchy. Still in existence in the 1970s, as far as I
> know; Lord only knows what's become of them since.
Taking this at face value (a dangerous thing to do), we have an interesting
social condition and indications that women enjoy an a swimming ability in
excess of men in at least some areas.
The latter fact has been known for a long time. There are expectations that
women will dominate over men in at least certain swimming sports. As I
recall, this is the one sport area where the gap is still closing (if not as
fast as some would hope). I suspect that women may in fact hold at least
some records for really long distance swimming, but I could be wrong.
But swimming was never my contention. Strength and other land bound
activities were. So Mr. Manley- did this Korean Matriarchy produce women
with greater upper body strength than their men or not?
One had better hope so or the one culture you found that might support your
contention in even a highly limited way is of little value to you. We do
know that it didn't produce women as strong as men of more tradition
cultures even given this 'matriarchy'.
By the way, is there any lifespan data on this culture?
Brian Gleichman
> Um, Brian? Given that this is true, who are you arguing
> with, and specifically what pseudo-science are they using? I have
> made quite clear in my posts that what I am talking about was how
> I would handle things in a *game*.
Then I guess I'm not arguing with you. You must have used wording that
caused me to lump you in with others who actually believe such things apply
to the real world.
Sorry.
> Note: What are you defining as a "better social order"?
'Better' as in better for the physical development of women. I made no call
as to any other effects, good or bad.
> I also defined this as meaning I thought that it would be less
> than 20%, since for my games I neglect many effects of the
> 10-20% level.
I wouldn't argue 80% for game purposes. After all, I give them 75% and
that's a bit high too. The best real world data I've seen indicates a value
of 70%.
I do think ignoring well defined differences of +/- 20% is a poor design
choice for any purpose I'd put a role-playing game to. If the system
measures physical strength, such a easily measured difference should be
accounted for.
But that is a matter of taste.
Brian Gleichman
news:7om89p$2...@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com...
> Would you consider any of the ideas I presented about
> female-dominated societies to be based in pseudo-science?
I would consider any theoretical society to be pseudo-science.
Without a valid experimental method or a real world example to prove the
conclusion, it's just so much hot air. If maybe really interesting and fun
hot air. But real science demands proof, not theory.
This is not to say that some pseudo-science doesn't give better SOD results
than others. Nor is it to say this is a bad thing.
But it's not real.
> Also, after thinking about these issues for a while it occurs to
> me that if someone wishes to go into the level of detail to
> modify stats by gender also modifying stats by social
> class in societies which have serious nutritional and activity
> differences based on social class.
One might. It would depend upon the campaign world and it's goals. I
wouldn't do it in my Middle Earth Campaign even if it would be reasonable in
certain areas.
It might be diffcult to find any data to base these modifiers on. You could
of course just wing it, nothing wrong with that unless you try to pass it
off as real world data.
John Morrow
Kip Manley <kipm...@yahoo.com> writes:
>Let's go over this again,
>folks -- NOBODY (to my knowledge) is denying there's a measurable gap in
>performance between statistically significant samples of males and
>females; what we're quibbling over is what causes this gap, and what it
>means as far as the potential of individual specimens, and whether or not
>one or another political ideology is blinding us to the glaring, obvious
>truth.
*My* argument here is the assumption that defaulting to the "no
natural differences" side is not the only reasonable approach to take
in a game system and that real world data supports that there is some
dimorphism between males and females that might reasonably be taken
into account by a game system if a game designer or group so desires.
>Since bad science and wooly-headed thinking annoy Mr. Gleichman so much,
>we can assume he doesn't mean to suggest that infant nutrition has no
>bearing on future development. Did it not occur that, rather than females
>being fed enough, and males fed more than enough, that females might
>perhaps have been underfed by the study's subjects?
It occurred to me. But without the study, it isn't really fair to
make an assumption either way, is it? That is why I want to see the
study. What country? What social class? How many subjects? Over
how long of a period? How was the sample chosen? Citing a study
without the parameters is only useful on a very superficial level.
And It is impossible to argue with the conclusions of a study if you
know nothing about the study. This is why I searched for the Sailer
article and other data -- so you could examine it yourself.
>And that this might
>have an effect on later development, which effect would be mitigated in
>other circumstances, where the amount of food is dictated by an objective
>rather than subjective scale?
Since the original introduction of this topic, I did a little looking
around on the web. I found the following quotes:
http://www.ballarat.edu.au/bssh/psych/hp602/60205.htm
...a web page on puberty from the University of Ballarat in Australia
contains the following lines:
"
o For most of the twentieth century, humans have been reaching puberty
earlier, and growing taller and heavier than their parents.
o AT PRESENT THIS PROCESS HAS REACHED A BIOLOGICAL LIMIT. The current
generation is the first this century to have roughly the same onset of
puberty, and growth levels as the generation before it. GENETICALLY
THIS TREND CANNOT CONTINUE.
"
http://www4.parentsplace.com/health/adulthealth/qa/0,3435,1073,00.html
...a web page from ParentsPlace.com, describing the average age of
menarche, states:
"
The answer to all your questions is yes. The average age of menarche
(pronounced men-ark-ee), or when periods begin, has decreased about
2-3 months per decade for the last 150 years. HOWEVER, THIS TREND
CEASED IN THE US AROUND 1940.
Better nutritional status and improved general health and well being
have influenced the age of onset as well as the progression of
pubertal development. HOWEVER, GENETIC FACTORS ALSO AFFECT THE AGE OF
PUBERTY.
"
[emphasis added by me in both cases]
I'm living in Tokyo so I am afraid that much of my research is
limited to web searches. If you have conflicting statements, I'd be
happy to look at them. This was all I could find after some pretty
extensive web searched on puberty and size trends.
(For what it's worth, it is clear from riding in any Tokyo subway that
the young men and women are taller than the previous generations but
it is also clear that the men still remain significantly taller both
on average and at the extremes than the women here.)
>Granted, this is all speculation. But it makes sense, and is an
>intriguing possibility for explaining the shrinking gender gap -- not
>just in sports records, which are a distorted measure of the performance
>of your average human, but in overall average weights and heights, where
>the gap in your basic industrialized, well-off nation is shrinking and
>continues to shrink.
Well, it doesn't continue to shrink which is the point of the Sailer
article and data. Assuming it is "shrinking and continues to shrink"
is false unless you have some data that suggests otherwise. The
shrinking has stopping in running and is starting to grow. And the
above-mentioned web quotes suggest that in the basic industrialized,
well-off nations that we've hit the point where poor nutrition no
longer factors in to growth, maturation, and performance.
(I found two sites with questionable sourcing that also suggested, in
support of the differences side, that late puberty can be beneficial
to some female athletes, not harmful, and that the absence of a father
in the family might actually promote earlier puberty in girls. The
former may specifically have been referring to gymnastics while the
latter just seemed strange to me since it didn't offer any reasonable
explanation.)
>Which is not to say that there isn't another
>explanation; just that I like this one.
Yes, I'm aware personal preference plays a big role in what
explanations people like or don't like (this is what I meant when I
said this was a "political" subject).
>And given the lack of
>desirability of female infants in many countries, and the resentment
>thereof (China and India leap to mind as broad examples), it's one I can
>believe all too readily.
It is believable. But there are also a lot of variables. American
children are getting more and more overweight. Have we, then, passed
the point at which any reasonably fed American child is lacking the
maximum nutrition that they can use to their benefit whether male or
female?
>Any other hypotheses to explain the shrinking
>gaps in height and weight?
I don't doubt that improved nutrition has benefitted both men and
women and probably women more than men. If you read the Sailer
article completely, you would notice that even he feels that women of
African descent could do better (and perhaps even close the running
gap a little more again in the future) if they had better nutrition
and better training. The question here is whether the gap is still
closing. What I am suggesting is that for first-world industrialized
nations, the gap may be as closed as it is going to get without
artificial enhancements (e.g., male hormones which will benefit women
more than men).
>Not so much a claim that women are maturing earlier than men -- though
>girls do mature faster than boys, or so the old saw would have us believe
>-- than that the onset of objective, institutional programs of infant and
>child nutrition might serve to help explain the corresponding shrinkage
>in gender gap in height, weight, and, yes, sports records.
I would tend to simply credit more access to cheap protein (everything
from chocolate milk and peanut butter to Big Macs) than any
"institutional programs" but I suspect that is our political
differences showing through again. There is also evidence that early
hunter-gatherers were historically larger than their agricultural
descendants, simply because they had more access to protein (and not
via any "institutional programs" that I can imagine). Some would also
credit wider genetic mixing as an element of size growth.
But the question isn't whether people have gotten larger (they have)
or whether the "gender gap" has closed in sports (it has) but where
the end-point of the trend is and if the end difference significant or
not.
>There's a
>POSSIBLE correlation there; the implications are interesting, and (to me,
>at least) give pause when considering current subjective notions of the
>gender gap, how wide it is, and what causes it -- and what bearing it
>might have on the potential of an individual man or woman.
Yes, but it is also subjective to assume that the gap will disappear
completely given the biological differences between men and women and
the known effects of male hormones on muscle mass and aggression.
>I haven't heard the 10% figure myself, but it strikes me as an
>exceedingly anecdotal figure, and thus suspect. I highly doubt that
>differences in performance are equally distributed, across the board, for
>all types of activity.
It is a rough guess but an educated one. 10% roughly corresponds to
Sailer's running gap. From what I've seen in weight-lifting records,
it is more like 30% (which I believe corresponds to Brian's data and I
looked at the raw data charted on a graph by weight lifted and lifter
at http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/8682/lift.htm and while the
women are less consistent, the pattern is still fairly clear). Is 10%
right? Maybe not. But it is probably at least as good of a figure as
0%.
>There's the fact that women overall tend to have
>more stamina than men overall, for instance; men overall tend to be
>better in sprints and lifting huge weights for brief periods of time.
I keep hearing that women have "more stamina" than men without any
real specific examples. Honestly, what is the basis for that claim?
Women are running about 10% behind men in the Boston Marathon, for
example, which seems counter-intuitive if women have better natural
endurance. On the other hand, your swimming example, below, may be
such an example. Are there any averages and records on free diving?
>There are also, if I recall correctly, interesting suggestions that women
>can bear a lot more pain than men, though this is such a highly
>subjective area I have to wonder how anyone begins to measure it...
It is possible.
[slavery example deleted]
>While this is a fascinating attempt to provide an objective window on the
>situation, I'd have to say that the cultural biases of the 19th century
>are such that it renders the valuation unusable.
I would simply say that there are way too many variables for it to be
very useful.
> Does a man who has been chronically malnourished, such that his
> growth is stunted, still perform at a 10% (or 25%, or whatever)
> physical edge over a woman who has been chronically
> malnourished?
>An interesting question, but it assumes the level of malnourishment is
>equal for males and females. I would imagine in most historical cases
>that males tended to get the better end of the bargain, which would skew
>performance towards their end of the gap.
You would imagine, but you don't have any evidence. India is a
particularly poor example because (for some reason that I cannot
comprehend) families must pay to marry off their daughters so that
they are pretty much only a liability. Other cultures vary widely on
how they treat children of either sex.
But a more interesting question is how much more malnourished would a
man have to be for women to have an edge on average and at the
extremes. And might it be better to model this sort of unusual
culture, in a generic system, with additional negative modifiers for
men? If I were going to model a culture with widespread lead
poisoning problems among their children in a generic system, for
example, I would do so by applying modifiers and not by dumbing down
the whole intelligence scale.
>One (being me) is tempted to start spouting off about the Great
>Matriarchy which ruled Mother Africa and the Eurasian continent before
>the Aryans came galloping down from wherever-the-hell and threw all our
>Venuses into the Willendorf trash-heap --
And one (being me) is tempted to respond with this...
http://www.discover.com/mar_99/breakpaleo.html
The most telling is the part where it says:
"'From wear on the surface, we can tell if they [statuettes of very
pregnant women] were passed from generation to generation,' he
[Randall White of New York University] says. 'They weren't. They were
put into the ground almost immediately.'"
It sounds like your Great Matriarchy was throwing their Venuses in the
trash-heap without any help from the nasty Indo-Europeans.
One (being me) is also tempted to respond by suggesting you read
Lawrence H. Keeley's _War Before Civilization_ concerning the
prehistoric matriarchal utopia envisioned by so many social
scientists. That Keeley had to change "fortifications" to
"enclosures" simply to get research funds to study fortifications in
prehistoric Europe is telling.
>but attempting to win an
>argument by inciting a stroke in the other party is generally considered
>to be bad form.
Just so long as you can provide references, feel free to try...
>Let's all agree that Graves's "White Goddess" matriarchy
>is a lovely idea utterly unsubstantiated in anything resembling cold,
>hard fact, and move on, shall we?
Fine with me.
>One is next tempted to cite Greek legends of the Amazons, but won't,
>because -- as there's little more than legend to go on -- they're
>terribly problematic as hard and fast evidence which can be historically
>situated.
It is entirely possible that amazon groups existed from time to time.
The evidence is, however, thin to non-existent depending on how
generous one is. I can imagine a few situations where Amazons might
exist but they would not be enduring cultures.
>One could bring up the Central Asian "Amazons," archeological evidence of
>which is being unearthed even as we speak; but very little is known or
>has been inferred about them beyond their undoubted existence, and
>besides, there's the immediately obvious problem that -- if the Central
>Asian "Amazons" indeed lived in female-only tribes -- women living by
>themselves isn't really a matriarchy, since they aren't dominating men.
The Central Asian evidence does suggest women may have had a strong
social role, as does Minoan Crete but it is telling that when large
numbers of armed individuals are shown in the Thera Minoan frescoes,
they are still men. In other words, the question is whether these
women were normal or in some way special and what, exactly, the whole
social milieu looked like. Lots of speculation involved all around.
Might I point out that many thought the Mayans were peaceful farmers
until their writing was deciphered and painted a different picture.
Given Elizabeth Wayland Barber's analysis of the work women have
historically performed in ancient societies (the work tends to be
something that can be done without a lot of travel and needs to be
easily interruptible such as weaving) along with the realities of
child bearing in a pre-modern society, I personally find it doubtful
that large numbers of women could fill the roles normally taken by men
(i.e., warriors and hunters) and still have a viable society with a
future. Remember that men can't nurse children (which was done until
children were *five* in some cultures) nor can they drive down to the
supermarket and buy formula in a pre-modern society. Men are also far
more expendable from a population standpoint (women are the
reproduction bottleneck, not men). Pregnancy is also something of a
bother, or so I keep hearing.
>One could bring up any number of cases, where the split between male and
>female spheres of power is sharp, and where judgment calls are required
>to begin to determine who has more power, males or females (certain
>African and Native American tribes leap to mind -- sans names,
>unfortunately; damn my memory) -- but one is hard-pressed to find a clear
>example of a "matriarchy" here. Still, the degree to which lines are
>blurred is intriguingly suggestive...
Again, if you can dig them up, I'd be interested in the names. It
really does help move things beyond the "well I've read a lot of
amorphous facts that prove I'm right" level which isn't very
convincing for anyone but the converted. I suspect that even given
these examples, though, that you couldn't find an example where women
regularly did the hunting or fighting or where their remains suggest
higher physical activity or better nutrition among the women which was
the point of the hypothetical matriarchy (one where men get inferior
nutrition).
>(One wonders if Mr. Gleichman is familiar with the so-called "men's
>rights" movement in the States, and their arguments that we currently
>live in a matriarchy -- citing health and happiness statistics [generally
>skewed towards women's advantage rather than men's], and pointing out
>that for the longest time women didn't have to work, while men turned
>over all their salaries to women -- but one assumes Mr. Gleichman
>wouldn't lend their silly, distorted arguments much credence at all. One
>also wonders whether -- given that "matriarchy" means "rule by mothers"
>in its literal sense -- he is familiar with the stereotypical cultural
>power of Jewish mothers, Italian mothers, or the mothers of the American
>South, white or black -- but these are trivial points, and one is
>starting to get a bit silly.)
The "men's rights" movement also points out figures that suggest that
more women instigate violence in a relationship (in the form of
hitting and shoving and even threatening with weapons) than men do.
If that is true, I'd argue that it is telling that women are
considered to need protection from abuse by men but men are not
seriously considered by most to need protection from women. I don't
see widely reported press conferences about how an increased number of
men are smacked around on Superbowl Sunday because their wives don't
want them to watch the game, for example, nor is anyone even bothering
to look to see if it happens.
I'm not saying this to poke fun at domestic abuse. I am simply trying
to point out that men are largely considered to be much more of a
threat to women than women are to men, even though some data suggests
that women do more hitting than men do. What would you say the reason
for that is?
>No, instead one turns to the islands off the coast of Korea, where much
>of the economy is based on diving for various forms of shellfish, and
>where -- as the waters are so cold, and as women tend to have a thicker
>layer of subcutaneous fat than men, larger lung capacities, and more
>stamina -- women do the diving, and are thus in control of the primary
>means of production for the community. On a number of these islands, we
>see some fascinating reversals: men raise the children, keep house, and
>spend most of their time gossiping with each other (in taverns, granted)
>about how cold and unfeeling their wives are; the women bring home the
>shellfish and bitch about how their houses aren't clean, and about how
>their men are silly and impractical. Of further interest -- there's a
>shamanic role in Korean folk religion filled most often by women; on
>these islands, the role is instead taken by men.
>There. A matriarchy. Still in existence in the 1970s, as far as I know;
>Lord only knows what's become of them since.
I find this a credible claim. Isolated cultures are often unusual
(Keeley cites that most of the truly pacifistic cultures are those who
were either isolated or had the room to move out of the way of
others). Do you have a name for the people or islands? I'm
interested in reading the details. I'm curious, for example, if they
still exhibit the traditional Korean preference for male children.
I'm also curious how the women deal with pregnancies and how the men
raise the children during the first few years of life when nursing is
required. Such information would be invaluable for trying to model
such cultures in a role-playing setting (I have no problem with
putting matriarchal cultures in a fantasy setting and would love
to see details that would make such a culture more plausible).
>I agree: bad science and wooly-headedness are to be strenuously fought
>wherever they are encountered, and critical thinking is in sadly short
>supply these days. But when one finds oneself making statements that a
>matriarchy has "never happened AND THERE'S NO FACTUAL FOUNDATION TO
>INDICATE IT CAN EVER HAPPEN," (emphasis added) -- well, one has abandoned
>critical thinking, and toppled over the other side of the debate.
Such a statement has been made before by academics probably more
knowledgeable than Brian or myself . I failed to make such a statement
largely because I'm reluctant to ever say "never" without checking
everything first. A large part of this also depends on how
"matriarchy" is defined (it differs from "matrilinear" which is more
common) and the details being looked at. Given the context of the
thought experiment -- a matriarchy that so under values it's male
children that it feeds them inadequately -- is indeed difficult to
imagine a real example or how such a situation could exist in a
lasting society.
>But. To get back to the topic at hand -- the bearing this idea has on
>random generation of statistics for characters:
>Psychohist wrote:
> Hm? It strikes me that a random mechanic that doesn't account
> for sexual dimorphism is practically guaranteed to be a worse
> approximation than a random mechanic that does, for any
> campaign where sexual dimorphism exists.
>Well, it has to do with the fact that the gender gap is most noted at the
>extremes -- there are extremes that men can reach that women can't,
>without aid of hormones and steroids (and why does that make them less
>female?
Actually, I think the "gender gap" is noted at all levels with respect
to physical strength. Except for the few years of puberty where girls
are physically larger than boys, I've anecdotally never seen an average
woman who is stronger than an average man given a similar lifestyle
(specifically, people who don't exercise or exercise only moderately).
This is why domestic abuse involving men beating up women is a problem
while the inverse generally isn't unless a weapon is involved. This
is why men mug women but women don't mug men. This is why sports are
segregated by sex long after segregation by race became unthinkable.
This is why physical standards have had to be lowered for several jobs
so that a significant number of women could qualify for them. The
examples are legion.
>Anybody bitching about how "unnatural" Mark McGwire's strength
>is?)
Yes, actually some people have. I heard a few people argue that Sosa
was more deserving of the record because of his natural ability. And
people certainly "bitched" about Ben Johnson, too, to the point where
they pulled his medal. And I think McGwire (to a lesser degree) and
Johnson (to a greater degree) perfectly illustrate the benefits of male
hormones which men normally have in abundance and women do not. Find
out what happens to girls given steroids during puberty, a time when
boys are flooded with the stuff and build quite a bit of muscle mass.
>-- and that, while there's a gap between the performance of men and
>women ON AVERAGE, for just about any spot on the bell curve, you will
>find both men AND women represented -- except, as noted, where we get to
>the freakish extremes of Olympic athletes. Given how granular most
>character stat systems are, and given that your average gaming campaign
>rarely rolls up a statistically significant number of characters, it just
>doesn't matter.
But remember that character generation is sometimes also designed to
produce realistic distributions, as well. Given that men have better
performance both on average (as evidence, I cite the fact that
physical performance criteria for both the military and fire fighters
have generally been reduced so that a significant number of women can
pass them) and at the extremes (I cite the Sailer data as well as
weight-lifting records), I would suggest that there is ample
justification for accounting for dimorphism if you want a realistic
distribution for normal humans.
As for stat ranges, I would argue that many systems are more than able
to notice a 10% gap at the high-end and an equal or larger gap in the
middle as significant. Remember that strength stats frequently
correspond to specific lift weights or even running speeds so the
actual effect in any system should be easy enough to judge.
>Yes, not having a weighting mechanic for sexual dimorphism is less
>accurate than having one -- but at the level of most campaigns, one will
>never notice the difference.
I would question your use of "most". "Most" campaigns are combat
oriented D&D games where both the stat range and the frequent combat
could justify that game's historical sexual dimorphism in the form of
stat modifiers if the participants wanted that sort of realism. The
genre being "simulated" also may or may not have this characteristic.
>(Unless one spends a lot of time rolling up
>hundreds of characters to see what might happen.)
All it takes is one female who is the strongest person in the world to
cause an SOD problem with some people. This is very likely in a point
generation system. All it takes is a dozen or so NPC women with above
average strengths to raise a few eyebrows in some circles, especially
if there is no explanation. Please remember that given numerical
attributes, everyone knows what average is. While it could take
months to notice a statistical effect near the average in the real
world, it can be noticed in moments in a game system that models such
differences.
>And given that the
>topic is highly charged, freighted with great personal and political
>significance for a lot of people -- and given that measurements of the
>gap are and have been subject to all sorts of cultural bias, and so are
>suspect, and so make statistical derivations of that gap themselves
>suspect -- why bother? Unless you've got a strange, counter-intuitive
>situation, like Mr. Snead's hypothetical Spartan Amazons, or those Korean
>fishing villages, and you want to use the weighting mechanism to keep
>people honest, who might otherwise make assumptions based on their own
>ideas of the gender gap, which are inaccurate for the situation at hand.
Do you find the inverse argument that since men and women obviously
are physically different in performance that such differences should
just be modeled by default unless it is a specifically fantasy world?
The "Why bother?" might simply be that the system designer and people
using it want to have realistic strength distributions in their games.
Why should that be unthinkable?
>If you want to model the freakish end of things, you might do what AD&D
>did, with that percentile strength over and above the flat 18, say, and
>limit the upper registers to men only. But anything above and beyond that
>courts heated argument and disagreement and accusations and counter-
>accusations, and is probably the first mechanism to be chopped out in a
>home-brew version. Again: why bother?
It isn't just the freakish end but also in the normal middle. While
modeling dimorphism causes problems from one side, not modeling it
can cause problems for people with different sensibilities. And if it
is so easily removed, then what is the problem with putting it in
there? Perhaps the real answer lies in making it an *optional rule*?
>But this is from someone who'd chop all the mechanics out, so you
>probably shouldn't listen to me, anyway.
Well, as I've said, I'm more than happy with fantasy rules that don't
make a point of dimorphism and my own homebrews have never have made
any distinction. But I can see why someone might want to model it and
my whole argument here is simply that dimorphism can be justified by
real world data and it is reasonable to model it if someone wants to
do so.
>One last request -- we've been pretty good about it so far, but it's
>still crept in, here and there. Given that the term "politically correct"
>is a semantically null buzz phrase, can we please dispense with it
>utterly -- in this discussion, at least? Thanks.
I actually think the term is quite useful in this sort of debate in
its original usage -- that the truth or falsehood of data is being
judged through a political lens and not an objective (or as close as
can be achieved) factual one. I almost never use it as a
"semantically null buzz phrase". Personally, it reminds me of the
violence that can be done to the truth in the name of politics (e.g.,
Lysenko, which has some relevance here). But even in the
"semantically null buzz phrase" it has its uses unless you prefer more
charged terms for the very real effect it describes.
John Morrow
Psychohist
while there's a gap between the performance of men and
women ON AVERAGE, for just about any spot on the bell curve, you will
find both men AND women represented -- except, as noted, where we get to
the freakish extremes of Olympic athletes. Given how granular most
character stat systems are, and given that your average gaming campaign
rarely rolls up a statistically significant number of characters, it just
doesn't matter.
Kip, could we show a little more tolerance for campaigns different from one's
own, here? The campaigns you are used to may not involve a statistically
significant number of characters, but over the 21 player years of Laratoa's
existence, many hundreds of player characters have been rolled up and played
for significant periods of time, and that doesn't even count the much more
numerous gamesmaster characters. The campaigns you are familiar with don't
necessarily characterize the 'average gaming campaign', much less the entire
spectrum.
Warren
John Kim
the errors that one should expect in such assignment. As a
general note on sexual dimorphism: I don't have a strong opinion
on just how much of the 1990's gender gap is genetic versus
cultural. I do think that there is a major difference in how much
women are encouraged to athletics versus men, which I expect does
have some effect.
Brian Gleichman <glei...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>John Kim <jh...@cascade.ps.uci.edu> wrote:
>> I also defined this as meaning I thought that it would be less
>> than 20%, since for my games I neglect many effects of the
>> 10-20% level.
>
>I wouldn't argue 80% for game purposes. After all, I give them 75%
>and that's a bit high too. The best real world data I've seen indicates
>a value of 70%.
Well, I would agree with you that for a game set in the 1990's
I would use around 70% for upper limit and optional random-roll. (i.e.
I don't tend to require random-roll design in my games, but if a player
wanted it, that would be my assessment.) I'm not sure why you adjust
up to 75% in _Age of Heroes_. Does your fantasy world have gender
roles that are favor female athlete more than the 1990's?
The above quote from me was for a hypothetical society which
from first principles should have less of a gender gap than 1990's
Earth. How much less is pure conjecture, but for game purposes one
has to set a number. I don't accept your logic that the 1990's gap
of 70% applies to any society... You get significantly wrong results
even when applying it to extremely similar conditions, like for
example the 1920's.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>I do think ignoring well defined differences of +/- 20% is a poor design
>choice for any purpose I'd put a role-playing game to. If the system
>measures physical strength, such a easily measured difference should be
>accounted for.
OK, how do you measure a physical strength stat? Bench
press, dead lift, squat thrust? Your numbers will vary by 5-10% even
for very similar measures like bench press versus overhead press.
When comparing back strength versus leg strength versus arm strength,
you get even larger errors... 20% is easily possible, although I
am not sure what a statistical standard deviation is.
And that doesn't even account for the error in game usage.
Even if you have 3-5 different strength stats to control the error
in the stat, this means that for any strength task you have to know
the parameters to within 10%. Can you really say that you can
accurately determine to within 10% how much a boulder weighs -- or
the split of back/leg/arm strength that is needed to move such a
boulder?
Kip Manley
> Responding to me, Kip Manley posts, in part:
> > given that your average gaming campaign rarely rolls up a
> > statistically significant number of characters, it just
> > doesn't matter.
> Kip, could we show a little more tolerance for campaigns different
> from one's own, here?
I could take this as an object lesson for how stereotypes dervied from
broad generalizations rarely do a good job of predicting or describing
individual examples -- if one were to average ALL campaigns, one would
include a vast majority that never got past three or four sessions, and
certainly never rolled up a statistically significant number of
characters -- but that would be disingenuous.
> The campaigns you are used to may not involve a statistically
> significant number of characters, but over the 21 player years of
> Laratoa's existence, many hundreds of player characters have been
> rolled up and played for significant periods of time, and that
> doesn't even count the much more numerous gamesmaster characters.
True enough, I'm sure. Did these characters come from many different
races and regions and classes, as well? Different job backgrounds, or
just "Adventurer"? How much statistical modelling do you use to account
for the various differences? How accurate do you feel it's been? Have
you tweaked the stat models as you went along?
> The campaigns you are familiar with don't necessarily characterize
> the 'average gaming campaign', much less the entire spectrum.
I certainly never meant to suggest such, and apologize if I've
offended. Good thing I like the taste of shoe leather...
More in a minute.
kip
Kip Manley
ambiguous arguments which allow for rhetorical arabesques and "beating
around the bush." More like real life -- and besides, I'm an
infuriating imp.
Brian Gleichman wrote:
> I don't think there's any need to continue the thread.
I'm sorry he feels this way. I think that, given the controversial
nature of the subject, we're doing a pretty good job of mostly avoiding
ad hominem attacks and the usual clutter of flame-throwing debate --
I'm astonished at the utter lack of trolls, to be frank. That said, I
do think we've got some cases where arguments are being flung past each
other without registering, and assumptions are being made which hinder
discussion. So I'll try to set aside my provocateur's hat for the
moment, and attempt to ask some clear and pertinent questions to clear
things up (a little).
Brian Gleichman wrote:
> Mr. Manley finally comes to the point after beating around the
> bush forever with near fantasy examples with a Korea
> 'Matriarchy'.
> Note that I never stated that Matriarchy can't exist, but that
> Matriarchy of the type that reverses the real world gender gap
> have never existed.
Okay. Restating the point to be "a matriarchy which reverses the gender
gap has never existed" changes my interpretation of the earlier
statement, which I'll clip --
> John R. Snead wrote:
> > Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule about
> > identical biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal society
Brian Gleichman wrote:
> Because it's never happened and there's no factual foundation
> to indicate it can ever happen.
Note that Mr. Snead merely postulated a hypothetical matriarchal
society, given identical biology/genetics; Mr. Gleichman went on to
state that "it's never happened." One merely has to haul forth a real-
world example to prove a matriarchy has, indeed, come to pass.
As to whether or not it reversed the gender gap, I don't know. I doubt
there's been any comprehensive nutritional studies of Korean island
diver societies. I don't know whether or not upper body strength in
these women is greater than the men; whether female infants are fed
better than male infants; or whether the men of these islands would
carry an iBook, or if they'd agree with John Dvorak that it's a girly
machine no "real man" would ever use. (Whoops. There's that provocateur
again. Sorry.)
Let me see if I can cut to the heart of one of the disagreements:
Brian Gleichman wrote:
> SOD is one thing. It's quite another to see people actually
> believe that real life gender gaps don't 'really' exist (or
> would cease to exist given a better social order) or that giant
> anime mecha will be the combatant of choice on the future
> battle field.
And John Morrow wrote:
> *My* argument here is the assumption that defaulting to the "no
> natural differences" side is not the only reasonable approach
> to take in a game system and that real world data supports that
> there is some dimorphism between males and females that might
> reasonably be taken into account by a game system if a game
> designer or group so desires.
I've quickly skimmed back over the arguments on this thread. To my
knowledge no one has stated that the gender gap doesn't "really" exist;
no one has stated that if everything were equal, differences in
strength, height, etc. between men and women overall would disappear. I
myself certainly haven't. Nor did I ever state one should default to
the "no natural differences" side, nor, to my knowledge, has anyone
else. I've just tried to point out that the gender gap is far more
complex than whether a given person has XX or XY chromosomes; that
there are cultural biases that affect not just nutrition but the
measurements and assumptions underlying said gap; that it's simplistic
at best to attempt to conform individual examples with overall
statistical trends; that all of these factors combine to make it
terribly problematic to assert a single statistical mechanism to
determine a universal gender gap, in the real world, or in a fictional
world which attempts to in some fashion model something quote realistic
unquote. I've stated, from my own admittedly anti-mechanics bias, that
given the granularity of most statistical systems, the broad spectrum
of possibility for individual women and men in the real world, and the
aforementioned problematic nature of attempting to model a gender gap,
that I myself would ignore it, as a mechanism. That does not mean there
isn't a gap.
I will admit to a certain political bias; then, everything's political.
(Yes, even that.) Certainly I've made some statements about "continued
shrinkage" which might not be borne out in fact, especially considering
the impressive body of research Mr. Morrow has dug up on the subject.
That does not change the fact that an attempt to statistically model
the gender gap which doesn't also address nutrition, class, cultural
bias, etc. etc. etc. is doomed to inaccuracy; that does not change my
opinion that such a statistical model would be terribly unwieldy for a
role playing game.
(A side note, to Mr. Morrow: I'm sorry you took my statement on the
Venus of Willendorf seriously. That was an utterly snarky remark on my
part; I find the blind willfulness with which so many anthropologists
cling to the prehistorical matriarchal utopia a touching example of
faith in these materialist, cynical times. Please, don't ever refer to
it as my matriarchy ever again? Thanks.)
Moving on, John Morrow wrote (regarding that damn infant feeding study):
> But without the study, it isn't really fair to make an
> assumption either way, is it? That is why I want to see the
> study. What country? What social class? How many subjects?
> Over how long of a period? How was the sample chosen? Citing
> a study without the parameters is only useful on a very
> superficial level.
Agreed. Agreed wholeheartedly. But I was only attempting to use the
study on an admittedly superficial level -- to show that it's possible
there's more than genetics as an explanation for the gender gap. And
given the number of factors which were brought up as having possible
bearing on the study -- class, location, bias, etc. -- shouldn't those
apply to the stats of an rpg character, too? Not just a simple
mechanism based on whether that character is male or female?
(My wife reports that the version of the study she most likely told me
about was cited in a book entitled Gendershock; neither of us can
remember the author, and I'm too lazy to go look for the author at the
moment...)
John Morrow wrote:
> I'm living in Tokyo so I am afraid that much of my research is
> limited to web searches. If you have conflicting statements,
> I'd be happy to look at them. This was all I could find after
> some pretty extensive web searched on puberty and size trends.
It's still pretty comprehensive. It certainly pimp-slaps my glib
statements about "continued shrinkage" of the gender gap. I don't have
any conflicting statements; I'm not sure if I could find any. I'd have
to go back and read a bunch of stuff I might not have the time to read.
So -- point conceded, unless I stumble across something which, once
again, changes my fickle mind. We may well have reached some sort of
genetic limit to performance; I'd still argue it's impossible to
isolate the genetic factor from all the other factors which affect the
potential of individual men and women, and model it statistically. (But
I probably wouldn't do a good job.)
> I would tend to simply credit more access to cheap protein
> (everything from chocolate milk and peanut butter to Big Macs)
> than any "institutional programs" but I suspect that is our
> political differences showing through again. There is also
> evidence that early hunter-gatherers were historically larger
> than their agricultural descendants, simply because they had
> more access to protein (and not via any "institutional
> programs" that I can imagine).
Um, by "institutional program," I just meant that in industrialized
nations, kids tend to spend more time in places like day care or
schools where lunch, snacks, and breakfast tend to be
institutionalized -- in the sense that everybody gets the same food,
and the same amount of food. As compared with a situation where the
kids are fed more haphazardly, at the biased whims of individuals. Not
that there was any institutional plan to reverse the horrible sexist
trends of the past, or anything like that. Just an accident of mass
production and mass feeding which might -- MIGHT -- help offset the
observed bias in feeding males more than females, and thereby might be
a contributing factor in the observed shrinkage in the gender gap --
which, whether or not it's stopped shrinking, nonetheless shrank, and
demonstrably moreso in industrialized nations than not. That's all. A
chain of complete speculation that I find interesting -- and that, to
me, raises possible questions about simplistic assumptions re: a gender
gap. (Is that hedged enough?)
And yeah, hunter-gatherers did eat better than agriculturists. Funny,
that.
> But a more interesting question is how much more malnourished
> would a man have to be for women to have an edge on average and
> at the extremes. And might it be better to model this sort of
> unusual culture, in a generic system, with additional negative
> modifiers for men?
This is what I've been trying to say, re: a statistical mechanism --
that I'd only really find it useful if the society or culture were such
that the resulting gender gap were different than the one we're used
to. But here, the gender gap would take into account diet, culture,
economics -- why shouldn't the "normal" gender gap mechanism? And if
you take that into account, you pretty much need a different gender gap
for every broad society you come up with...
I find it interesting that no one's brought up racial modifiers in most
fantasy rpgs as a justification for gender modifiers. I also find it
interesting my knee jerks less at those than at the idea of a gender
modifier. Huh. Perhaps because -- in my opinion -- "male" and "female"
are much broader categories, with much more overlap, than "elf"
and "dwarf" (though Lord only knows how much of that is due to "real"
differences between elves and dwarves, and how much to my biased
perceptions of same)? Certainly, I'd have a problem with a system of
racial modifiers which applied one set of modifiers to Grey Elves, who
all come from the Golden Woods of the Dawn east of Foggy Flats -- and
another set of modifiers applied to all Humans regardless of origin.
But do we really want to open that can of worms?
Regarding my long list of examples:
> Again, if you can dig them up, I'd be interested in the names.
> It really does help move things beyond the "well I've read a
> lot of amorphous facts that prove I'm right" level which isn't
> very convincing for anyone but the converted. I suspect that
> even given these examples, though, that you couldn't find an
> example where women regularly did the hunting or fighting or
> where their remains suggest higher physical activity or better
> nutrition among the women which was the point of the
> hypothetical matriarchy (one where men get inferior nutrition).
Yeah, well, I'm lazy. Plus, I'm at work right now, with limited
internet access. Maybe later?
Anyway. I wasn't trying to prove anything about the existence of a
society in which the gender gap was reversed; I was merely trying to a)
co-opt "the other side's" arguments debunking what they might have
thought a "real" matriarchy would be (which is why I brought up and
dismissed Willendorf, Amazons, etc. etc.), and b) demonstrate that
simplistic, sweeping generalizations tend to allow a lot of interesting
possibilities to fall through the cracks.
As far as the Koreans go: first, I'm sorry I haven't yet come up with
the name(s) of the islands. A couple of hours of internet searching
thus far have proved fruitless. My wife sold off her books on Korean
shamanism a while ago, but that's where we ran across it -- a study of
Korean shamanism that was intrigued by the gender reversal found on
these islands, and spent some time looking into why this reversal came
about. Mostly anecdotal, with some information about how early
childhood was managed, but damned if I can remember. Still looking.
What's interesting is how far I had to go to find something which could
even squeak under a definition of "matriarchy." (To be honest, my wife
frowned when I said I was counting it as such; "There's no evidence
there's ever been a matriarchy -- there's much more evidence of
egalitarian, or separate-but-equal, cultures." Before Mr. Gleichman
leaps upon me with hobnailed boots, I'll just point out in my defense
that the reversal of gender roles and power structures makes these
isolated Korean fishing villages as much a matriarchy as an isolated
Midwestern farm town is a patriarchy...) It's a tiny, isolated, pocket
example, and certainly not a broad cultural trend, based on a very
specific convergence of physiology, economics, and geography.
Nonetheless, it's interesting, the extent to which what we think of as
gender roles are reversed: men aren't cold and unfeeling; people who
spend all their time working away from the family are. Women aren't
frivolous gossips; people who spend most of their time in community
taking care of lots of little tasks are. Et cetera.
John Morrow wrote:
> I am simply trying to point out that men are largely considered
> to be much more of a threat to women than women are to men,
> even though some data suggests that women do more hitting than
> men do. What would you say the reason for that is?
Cultural bias in perception, which has also affected how people
perceive the potential of individual men and women. Stereotypes drawn
from erroneous generalizations -- or even stereotypes based on
reasonably accurate portraits of the group as a whole, which have
little to no bearing on any given individual.
John Morrow wrote:
> Given that men have better performance both on average (as
> evidence, I cite the fact that physical performance criteria
> for both the military and fire fighters have generally been
> reduced so that a significant number of women can pass them)
Um, citing Tom Clancy (Carrier, his study of aircraft carriers,
published earlier this year), the Navy abandoned its attempt to a)
lower physical standards and b) have different physical standards for
females than males in its aviation program. Both proved disastrous --
as any idiot could have predicted. Instead, the Navy has set a single
stringent standard. Fewer women than men overall can meet it. But women
do, all the time. In "significant" numbers. I can't speak to the
firefighters. Given how lazy I am regarding my own sources, I hesitate
to ask for same, but I can't lend credence to the idea that any public
program with lower performance standards for women than men has
survived the nasty, vocal backlash against affirmative action. (Or the
resulting lack of competency.)
(Hee hee. I just cited Tom Clancy. God, I love irony.)
Ahem. John Morrow went on to write:
> I would suggest that there is ample justification for
> accounting for dimorphism if you want a realistic distribution
> for normal humans.
But there's also ample justification for accounting for many, many
other factors which affect realistic distributions -- class, nutrition,
etc. etc. Why just do sexual differences?
> All it takes is one female who is the strongest person in the
> world to cause an SOD problem with some people. This is very
> likely in a point generation system.
Huh? How? How is my female fighter with a STR of 18 stronger than your
male fighter with a STR of 18? (Assuming 18 is the limit, of course.)
Is there a special characteristic "strongest in the world" which can be
bought with points?
> All it takes is a dozen or so NPC women with above average
> strengths to raise a few eyebrows in some circles, especially
> if there is no explanation.
Average for what? Average for women? If they're fighters, I'd hope
they're stronger than average. A few dozen? Out of what number? Unless
you're playing with serious munchkins, you'd be just as likely to have
a dozen men with above-average strength, if you played without a gender-
biasing mechanism. Why wouldn't those dozen above-average men raise
eyebrows? Because men are "supposed" to be strong?
Whoops, there's the provocateur hat again. Sorry.
> It isn't just the freakish end but also in the normal middle.
> While modeling dimorphism causes problems from one side, not
> modeling it can cause problems for people with different
> sensibilities.
No argument there. I would point out that most characters, especially
in "heroic" games, are exceptional examples -- not average, normal,
middle.
> And if it is so easily removed, then what is the problem with
> putting it in there? Perhaps the real answer lies in making it
> an *optional rule*?
No argument there, either. But I would maintain that a simple mechanic
which allows one range of characteristics for all men and another for
all women is too simplistic, and would result in inaccurate,
unrealistic results.
And finally, regarding the term "politically correct," Mr. Morrow wrote:
> I actually think the term is quite useful in this sort of
> debate in its original usage -- that the truth or falsehood of
> data is being judged through a political lens and not an
> objective (or as close as can be achieved) factual one.
YOU were the source of that definition! Ha. I've always been charmed by
that definition; I remembered running across it on the advocacy board;
I've never seen it anywhere else, but it's a great one -- mostly
because it's neutral as to what political content the data is being
judged by. As it should be. It's certainly as easy for "conservatives"
to be politically correct as "liberals" -- one merely has to look to
most attacks on the so-called "P.C." for evidence.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, it isn't the original usage. The term
began, as far as I know, in liberal circles in the mid to late
seventies, as a joke about people who took their politics too
seriously; specifically, I believe it began in the gay rights movement,
who would refer snarkily to other gays and lesbians who insisted
on "politically correct" modes of behavior, dress, and sex. I can only
cite anecdotal evidence from attending college in the late 80s, when
people would bitch about the (even then) gross overusage of the term by
the Right, and discuss its original meaning -- as a joke; added to
that, a couple of references in gay fiction and comics, but the
earliest I can think of is from the early 80s.
I will agree that I wish "politically correct" to shift in meaning to
your definition -- how old is it? Where did you run across it? -- and
will state for the record that, as long as it's used thusly, it's a
valuable tool, and I won't protest its presence in this discussion.
See? Fun.
Psychohist
if one were to average ALL campaigns, one would include a vast
majority that never got past three or four sessions
Is this 'a vast majority' based on your own experience, or on a blanket survey
of all campaigns ever started? All the campaigns that I know of lasted at
least a year: the gamesmasters I knew prepared carefully enough that the
campaigns didn't fizzle. I'm willing to credit the vast majority of
gamesmasters with that amount of care.
True enough, I'm sure. Did these characters come from many different
races and regions and classes, as well? Different job backgrounds, or
just "Adventurer"?
The vast majority were humans from a culturally fairly uniform island. Most
were from artisan families, but some from hunting villages. The diet on the
island, even among the less fortunate, is high in animal protein, so dietary
constraints are not a huge impact on physical development. This is why I
considered modern American statistics to be valid for the characters in
question.
How much statistical modelling do you use to account
for the various differences? How accurate do you feel it's been? Have
you tweaked the stat models as you went along?
I was not as anal about these things when I started as I am now; characters
generated under the original system had a build similar to the gamesmaster's (a
problem not unique to my game). There were subsequently two major revisions to
these rules, the most recent in 1986; that revision was based on the best
statistics I could find on the American population.
The changes were saved up for the two major revisions rather than being added
in small 'tweaks' because each change had to be retroactively applied to all
the characters then living, taking into account both where they fell
statistically and fairness to the players' character concepts.
I did a lot of analysis on the most recent revision in the hopes that it would
be complete and accurate enough to obviate any need for further revisions. So
far, no revisions have been needed.
Warren
Brian Gleichman
> I'm not sure why you adjust up to 75% in _Age of Heroes_.
> Does your fantasy world have gender roles that are favor
> female athlete more than the 1990's?
Three reasons:
The 75% decision was made in the eighties, before the female performance
growth curve had started to flatten. I put in extra room for this.
The genre requires combat capable females. I made some unrealistic
adjustments to allow this including the unlikely combat effects of the AG
and QU modifiers.
Lastly, it fits the effective strength chart better than a 70% value does.
The first reason doesn't seem valid anymore, but the last two still apply.
> I don't accept your logic that the 1990's gap of 70% applies to
> any society... You get significantly wrong results
> even when applying it to extremely similar conditions, like for
> example the 1920's.
It would be easy to prove that greater gaps are possible. Use the military's
50% value for females that aren't given six months of additional high
intensity training or the 33% value of the general US population. You might
be able to find even greater gaps outside the US.
The existence of such figures show that culture can produce very different
gaps. It should be easy to accept a fantasy culture producing similar real
world gaps.
Smaller gaps however are unproven. This is as good as it's ever been in
human history (at least as far as we can scientifically prove). Venture onto
such grounds as a pure work of fantasy.
> OK, how do you measure a physical strength stat? Bench
> press, dead lift, squat thrust? Your numbers will vary by
> 5-10% even for very similar measures like bench press
> versus overhead press.
The reason I used the military studies was they it measured strength across
a wide variety of uses and real world activities. The final numbers were a
composite effectiveness.
No doubt women did better in some tests and worst in others. But this
represent what the military deemed as the relevant center. Without better
information, I decided to use this for my center as well.
I may short them at certain tasks, but at the same time I give them too much
credit for others.
There is a reason one shoots for the center of mass of a target. Over the
long term you get more kills.
--
Brian Gleichman
glei...@mindspring.com
Age of Heroes: http://gleichman.home.mindspring.com/
John Kim
what he had to say. If you want to realistically represent a game-
world where society is similar to historical or modern Earth, then
I certainly think that sexual dimorphism is justified.
What I disagree with is that it is inherently realistic
to take data on the gender gap in athletics from 1990's Earth and
then applying it to a fantasy world (with presumably vastly different
conditions).
John Morrow <mor...@eris.io.com> wrote:
> *My* argument here is the assumption that defaulting to the "no
> natural differences" side is not the only reasonable approach to take
> in a game system and that real world data supports that there is some
> dimorphism between males and females that might reasonably be taken
> into account by a game system if a game designer or group so desires.
I would agree with this, and even Kip (who you were responding
to) described the nature-vs-nurture question as "the jury is still out"
rather than claiming that there was evidence that the gender gap was
purely non-natural. I would say that I have no doubt that there is
an inherent natural (i.e. genetic) difference, the only question is
one of scale.
As I said, for game purposes it isn't neccessary to distinguish
what is "natural" versus "cultural". The problematic case is the
rare case of a hypothetical society which is nearly sex-blind as far
as encouraging strength and athletics.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>Kip Manley <kipm...@yahoo.com> writes:
>> Granted, this is all speculation. But it makes sense, and is an
>> intriguing possibility for explaining the shrinking gender gap --
>> not just in sports records, which are a distorted measure of the
>> performance of your average human, but in overall average weights
>> and heights, where the gap in your basic industrialized, well-off
>> nation is shrinking and continues to shrink.
>
>Well, it doesn't continue to shrink which is the point of the Sailer
>article and data. Assuming it is "shrinking and continues to shrink"
>is false unless you have some data that suggests otherwise.
I would note that Kip seems to be talking about the gender
gap in weights and heights for industrialized nations, while you
are referring to Olympic running data.
In any case, I certainly agree that the gender gap in
athletics is not continuously shrinking. The problem I have with
the Seiler and Sailer article is that it concludes causes with no
analysis whatsoever. In particular, it assumes (with no references)
that conditions for women athletes uniformly improved world-wide
throughout the 60's, 70's, and 80's -- thus the only possible
explanation for non-shrinking behavior is steroids.
Anecdotally, I find that in the 90's there is still an
enormous difference between athletic participation in the average
man and woman, especially in strength-building. I know at least a
dozen men who are into weightlifting, versus zero women. I would
suspect that this has an effect on the Olympic statistics.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>But remember that character generation is sometimes also designed to
>produce realistic distributions, as well. Given that men have better
>performance both on average [...] and at extremes [...] I would
>suggest that there is ample justification for accounting for dimorphism
>if you want a realistic distribution for normal humans.
This was pretty much my argument with Brian: that one can
assume that the 1990's distribution is inherently the "normal" way
that humans are, and apply it to any fantasy society. The real
distributions will change radically even if you have a game set
in, say, the 1920's. Transpose to a fantasy world, and I think
you are fooling yourself if you say that your distributions
realistically account for order 10% distinctions.
Brian Gleichman
news:7omo8i$mg$1...@eris.io.com...
> and that the absence of a father in the family might actually
> promote earlier puberty in girls.
<snip>
> while the latter just seemed strange to me since it didn't offer
> any reasonable explanation.
No proof, but it maybe it's an attempt to correct what is seen by the
biology of the girl as a population balance problem, i.e. not enough males
around- make more.
It would be a good subject for a real study...
> I keep hearing that women have "more stamina" than men
> without any real specific examples. Honestly, what is the basis
> for that claim?
I have no idea where the claim comes from. The military found that it
definitely wasn't the case citing performance levels of around 60-80% as I
recall depending upon how intense additional training was.
But it was at one time widely believed. So much so that a great deal of
effort was put into finding out why the theory hadn't panned out.
I seen the blame put on inefficient motion due to physical structure and/or
a smaller heart/lungs/etc (even after adjusting for the size difference).
As a pure guess, I'd say it came from the same place that the concept of
greater speed and agility did. A point of measure much lower on the strength
curve than reasonable for athletes.
The pain threshold is another interesting area. But I'd like to know if the
method of measure was just the detection of pain, or the limit of function
while under extreme pain.
Psychohist
or whether the men of these islands would carry an iBook,
or if they'd agree with John Dvorak that it's a girly
machine no "real man" would ever use.
They'd carry iBooks. Tangerine. And complain about the weight, and use it as
an excuse not to go to the bar, but just gossip over the wireless LAN. Trust
me.
Warren
who's too wimpy to carry a 7 pound iBook
Brian Gleichman
> Okay. Restating the point to be "a matriarchy which reverses
> the gender gap has never existed" changes my interpretation
> of the earlier statement, which I'll clip --
>
> > John R. Snead wrote:
>
> > > Anyway, how would there be any violation of the rule
> > > about identical biology/genetics to postulate a matriarchal
> > > society
This is an edited clip. John went on to say (without any space or editing on
my part):
]where women received better nutrition than men and where
] women were the only ones to receive extensive physical
]training? In such a society it would seem perfectly
]reasonable for average for female physical strength to be
]greater than the male average.
Leaving this clip in, the following is an unreasoned statement...
> Note that Mr. Snead merely postulated a hypothetical
> matriarchal society, given identical biology/genetics; Mr.
> Gleichman went on to state that "it's never happened." One
> merely has to haul forth a real-world example to prove a
> matriarchy has, indeed, come to pass.
...since the gender gap reverse was part of John's requirements.
> Instead, the Navy has set a single stringent standard.
I've seen those standards. They're based on the PT and states requirements
of setups and pushups (which women actually have less trouble with than men
due to a lighter upper body structure).
Not stuff like carrying men out of a burning section of the ship or hauling
fire fighting gear for hours on end or loading equipment and weapons on
planes.
But it plays better at the White House than 'sorry dude, this is really
bad'. The navy guys get to keep their careers this way.
---
As for why I have human gender modifiers and not racial and social level
ones....
Because the later is definitely against genre for Age of Heroes and the
former is very much part of it.
Nuff said.
George W. Harris
<glei...@mindspring.com> wrote thusly:
=Smaller gaps however are unproven. This is as good as it's ever been in
=human history (at least as far as we can scientifically prove). Venture onto
=such grounds as a pure work of fantasy.
Extrapolation is not fantasy; rejecting it out of hand
as such is unreasonable.
--
Real men don't need macho posturing to bolster their egos.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Brian Gleichman
news:19990809201511...@ng-cg1.aol.com...
> The key is to seek the truth, rather than merely to attempt to
> justify one's own preconceptions. (Plus be intelligent enough
> to put together a good simulation.)
True enough. Some are more interested in making a splash than in using
correct methods.
The early nuclear winters studies had similar flaws as they almost went out
the way to exclude contra-factors from the model. I imagine such things will
always be with us.
Brian Gleichman
news:37b46a16....@news.mindspring.com...
> Extrapolation is not fantasy; rejecting it out of hand
> as such is unreasonable.
All biological growth curves end. It's their nature, it's foolish to think
otherwise.
Besides, the current curve extrapolation we are debating here indictates it
has reached that end.
Amber, Dan, DARE, or Julie
<snip>
> And yeah, hunter-gatherers did eat better than agriculturists. Funny,
> that.
The thing about agriculture isn't that it's a higher-quality diet, or
that it requires less input energy for its output; agriculture in fact
sucks wind on both counts. The thing about agriculture is that you're
not as tightly tied to your prey species' uncontrollable variations in
population, and you're better able to increase their size through your
own efforts. Hunter-gatherers can't put 10% extra work in and expect a
similar increase in production - they'd get a smaller increase at first,
then a decrease as the prey species' unpredated numbers fall. But with
agriculture, you can sustainably increase your production by increasing
your input energy.
- DARE, GURPSist extraordinaire and plenipotentiary
* "Priests of the Unicorn got you down? Snap into a Slim Jim!" -
Siegfried
* Hi! I'm a .sig virus! Join the fun and copy me into yours! :)
Psychohist
Until then, it is based not upon existing player world facts, but upon
statistical prediction. Such theories have nearly always been proven false
in reality as they fail to account for negative effects, always assuming
things will continue as they have.
You risk the same mistakes of the 60-70s population growth estimates.
Indeed, given the history of such 'predictions', you are almost assured of
it.
A bit of a tangent, but any competent systems dynamicist could have told you
that the population growth estimates to which you refer were naive and faulty,
and why. The club of Rome's own models would have told them that population
growth would eventually cease to accelerate and eventually turn negative, had
they not put in a specious assumption specifically to drive the numbers to
doomsday proportions (they assumed that, contrary to all evidence, the number
of children per family would cease to decline and resume increasing at a
certain level of affluence).
My own models have not had the same problems. The predictive models I made
five to seven years ago of the wireless market are still holding out well -
including areas in which those predictions departed from extrapolation.
The key is to seek the truth, rather than merely to attempt to justify one's
own preconceptions. (Plus be intelligent enough to put together a good
simulation.)
After all, it's only by extrapolation that we believe the laws of gravity apply
to masses as large as galaxies, as well as to more mundane and measurable
masses like suns and planets.
Back on topic, I don't see my mechanics as claiming anything about 'the
strongest possible man' or 'the strongest possible woman'. Rather, I see them
as modelling farther out into the tail of the population of women than that of
man (modelling men only to the top half a percentile, while women are modelled
to the last hundredth of a percentile).
Though I suspect you still wouldn't be happy with it. I'm still hoping to hear
John's opinion, too.
Warren
Warren J. Dew
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