[Discussion Thread] Gameplay differences between PC genders?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
21

[quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:19, topic:6000”][quote=“Funk, post:8, topic:6000”]+1 for hair and plus +1 for beads still letting your face get cold mine is only realy any good at keeping my chin warm.

I’ve never seen how that idea keep comeing up it this day and age when it is so easy to look on line and see things like
British International Most Powerful Woman, or dozen pics of women with muscles.

Lets just assume that every one went to the gym or that stronger women and men roll for bigger bodys.[/quote]

You just proved my point with that link.
Peak female strength is comparable to a man of above average strength.

Show me a woman who could stand up to someone like peak Karelin in power, and then I might agree that “Women are strong too!!”.
Go ahead, I’ll wait here.[/quote]
-.- You sir, win jackass of the year, with the runner up… drum roll please… ALL OF 4CHAN!
Congratulations! You are a bigger jackass than 4chan.

22

[quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:21, topic:6000”][quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:19, topic:6000”][quote=“Funk, post:8, topic:6000”]+1 for hair and plus +1 for beads still letting your face get cold mine is only realy any good at keeping my chin warm.

I’ve never seen how that idea keep comeing up it this day and age when it is so easy to look on line and see things like
British International Most Powerful Woman, or dozen pics of women with muscles.

Lets just assume that every one went to the gym or that stronger women and men roll for bigger bodys.[/quote]

You just proved my point with that link.
Peak female strength is comparable to a man of above average strength.

Show me a woman who could stand up to someone like peak Karelin in power, and then I might agree that “Women are strong too!!”.
Go ahead, I’ll wait here.[/quote]
-.- You sir, win jackass of the year, with the runner up… drum roll please… ALL OF 4CHAN!
Congratulations! You are a bigger jackass than 4chan.[/quote]

I’ll take that as an admission of defeat from you members of the feminist faction.

Are women inferior human beings? Not really (Not all of them anyways).
Are they weaker on average and have a much lower limit? Yes and anyone who denies that denies the obvious.

There are enormous differences between men and women, physical AND mental, to quote Artistotle: “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal”.

Both genders have their strong points and it’s by embracing them that society works, trying to fight them only causes strife.
Exceptions are just that: exceptions.

23

Following your logic we should also add UV radiation to Cata and have “the blacks” be less prone to sunburns.

Back on topic: No. Gender should only matter to roleplayers.
And IIRC zombies don´t even have a gender until they are killed.

24

Following your logic we should also add UV radiation to Cata and have “the blacks” be less prone to sunburns.

Back on topic: No. Gender should only matter to roleplayers.
And IIRC zombies don´t even have a gender until they are killed.[/quote]

If you wanted to differentiate races then yeah, having blacks deal better with hot weather would make sense.
However as far as the game is concerned imho it isn’t worth it and people would whine to no end.

25

Personally I’m not really for having the game draw major distinctions based entirely upon potentially offensive stereotypes of gender roles and racial tendencies. Not only because it smacks of ridiculous racist and sexist ideals that have no real place in the game, but also because, uh, well, it’s already a point buy system, where you set the stats to what you feel is appropriate, and the game makes no distinction itself on what caps or limits you can put on except what points you have, and that’s precisely how it SHOULD work, mechanically. Otherwise you get characters that are, frankly, strictly “better” mechanically… based on the previously mentioned offensive stereotypes.

26

Gender-based stat differences are stupid because male and female don’t tell you anything about the particular character’s body or mind. Even if 90% of men were mentally retarded powerlifters and 90% of women were 80-pound asthmatic geniuses, it would still be stupid to make male and female a stat-based differentiation because characters are people, not averages, and the customization options to make your character fit your image of him or her are already there.

What would be reasonable under certain circumstances (but I would argue not Cata, without major changes) is a size-category based system, where a large character might get better str but higher chance to be hit by projectiles and higher metabolism, and so forth. Scale the baseline stats appropriately on a random-rolled or graduated point buy system, the way rpgs do it with races, and you’ve got a functional way of making your 5’4’’, 130lb character (average healthy American female) weaker than your 5’10’’, 170lb character (average healthy American male) without taking the element of choice away from the player; all you’re doing is making it more efficient to play characters whose stats match their physique.

This, however, would still be stupid in cataclysm, because cataclysm doesn’t have a graduated point buy or a bellcurved dice-roll system for generating stats. It would be completely pointless unless you already intended to fully minmax a particular stat, which is pretty much suicide no matter which stat you choose. Even for a size system to work, you’d have to completely rebuild the cata character generator to be more like one of the typical RPG-styles of stat allocation: allocate an array, choose from a set of prerolled results, or use a graduated point-buy where small deviations from average are cheap and large deviations are costly.

So, in short: gender-based stat differentiation is stupid, and even the non-gender version of it that could be cool isn’t a good fit for this game as it currently exists.

PS, beard and long hair traits are good. 5 warmth maybe?

27

Maybe something simple like certain npcs like females better than men and vice versa (either randomly determined, or determined by npc personality types, assuming the game even gets npc personality types for npcs.)

28

I’m getting ifftopic here, but I think a trait like “charming” would be nice to have. Charater with this trait will have better interaction with NPC of the opposite sex.

29

Or the same sex, if the NPC happens to go that way.

I am completely against there being mechanical differences between the genders, we learned that mistake from D&D 1.0 (Women could never get maximum strength for whatever reason) and FATAL (ALL ABOARD THE MISOGYNY AND RACISM TRAIN!), didn’t we?

30

Or the same sex, if the NPC happens to go that way.

I am completely against there being mechanical differences between the genders, we learned that mistake from D&D 1.0 (Women could never get maximum strength for whatever reason) and FATAL (ALL ABOARD THE MISOGYNY AND RACISM TRAIN!), didn’t we?[/quote]

Indeed, realism is so stupid and overrated.
If we believe something hard enough and insult those who disagree with our enlightened vision of sameness then it will become true!

The day in which all diversity is eliminated and everything is the exact same thing is near!
All hail sameness! Death to those who oppose us!

31

Problem: DDA uses ST not only for muscle power but also for endurance, general health, and so on. This is why I had to do fiddly things with maxHP and ultimately needed someone to make a new function for it when doing the HUGE mutation: it creates muscle mass but not the cardio and other infrastructure to properly support it.

Theoretically (I don’t have online-cites at hand) the “male” muscle-build works better for comparatively-short short bursts of explosive strength (weightlifting, most Real USian Sports such as Football or Baseball), and the “female” muscle-build works better for sustained effort over the long term (any race longer than a marathon. 100-mile runs, 24-hour go-as-far-as-you-can runs, endurance swimming, etc.)

It’s not without reason that most heavily-promoted sports in the US favor the “male” strength model. Helps when trying to create these sorts of comparisons.

If DDA was some sort of sports simulator, then yeah, gender distinctions might be marginally useful. Post-apocalypse isn’t much of a sport though. Unless you want to bog everything down with a lot of tedious work, let’s stick with the current system.

32

Football mod when?
Hulk zed hulk zed he’s our man, if he can’t do it brmgrhg I’m a zombie.

33

[quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:30, topic:6000”]Indeed, realism is so stupid and overrated.
If we believe something hard enough and insult those who disagree with our enlightened vision of sameness then it will become true!

The day in which all diversity is eliminated and everything is the exact same thing is near!
All hail sameness! Death to those who oppose us![/quote]

Strawman much?

Tolerance and inclusion != wishing harm upon bigots.

When you attempt to use realism and recognizing diversity as cover-words for enforced sexism, you’re doing a grave disservice to both tolerance and your own public image.

It’s often better to remain silent and let others think you’re an idiot, rather than opening your mouth and proving it to them.

34

Sigging this.

35

To be fair, I was paraphrasing Mark Twain there.

36

[quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:22, topic:6000”][quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:21, topic:6000”][quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:19, topic:6000”][quote=“Funk, post:8, topic:6000”]+1 for hair and plus +1 for beads still letting your face get cold mine is only realy any good at keeping my chin warm.

Nuture when

I’ve never seen how that idea keep comeing up it this day and age when it is so easy to look on line and see things like
British International Most Powerful Woman, or dozen pics of women with muscles.

Lets just assume that every one went to the gym or that stronger women and men roll for bigger bodys.[/quote]

You just proved my point with that link.
Peak female strength is comparable to a man of above average strength.

Show me a woman who could stand up to someone like peak Karelin in power, and then I might agree that “Women are strong too!!”.
Go ahead, I’ll wait here.[/quote]
-.- You sir, win jackass of the year, with the runner up… drum roll please… ALL OF 4CHAN!
Congratulations! You are a bigger jackass than 4chan.[/quote]

I’ll take that as an admission of defeat from you members of the feminist faction.

Are women inferior human beings? Not really (Not all of them anyways).
Are they weaker on average and have a much lower limit? Yes and anyone who denies that denies the obvious.

There are enormous differences between men and women, physical AND mental, to quote Artistotle: “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal”.

Both genders have their strong points and it’s by embracing them that society works, trying to fight them only causes strife.
Exceptions are just that: exceptions.[/quote]
Nurture vs nature, women are taught they are much weaker, therefor they accept it.
True though, a woman compared to a body builder is weaker, but the average joe, which our character is, is going to be a pretty fucking even match to a woman.

37

[quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:36, topic:6000”]Nurture vs nature, women are taught they are much weaker, therefor they accept it.
True though, a woman compared to a body builder is weaker, but the average joe, which our character is, is going to be a pretty fucking even match to a woman.[/quote]

While I agree, that C:DDA should follow equality path (not only for reasons mentioned above, but also for much more robust character creation process).

That said from biological perspective males tend have better expressed muscle repair pathways resulting in faster damage recovery during exercise and faster muscle mass acquisition. This allows males to achieve much greater maximum force, but decreased bloodflow due to mass will cause it to work with less efficiency during below-maximum exertions.

This alone makes males excel at maximum exertions, while females perform better at low intermediate intensity as well as continuous muscle contractions.

And this is just a tip of the iceberg, there are many more biological differences between both genders. None of which are significant enough to hardcode it into character creation.

38

[quote=“Garm, post:37, topic:6000”][quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:36, topic:6000”]Nurture vs nature, women are taught they are much weaker, therefor they accept it.
True though, a woman compared to a body builder is weaker, but the average joe, which our character is, is going to be a pretty fucking even match to a woman.[/quote]

While I agree, that C:DDA should follow equality path (not only for reasons mentioned above, but also for much more robust character creation process).

That said from biological perspective males tend have better expressed muscle repair pathways resulting in faster damage recovery during exercise and faster muscle mass acquisition. This allows males to achieve much greater maximum force, but decreased bloodflow due to mass will cause it to work with less efficiency during below-maximum exertions.

This alone makes males excel at maximum exertions, while females perform better at low intermediate intensity as well as continuous muscle contractions.

And this is just a tip of the iceberg, there are many more biological differences between both genders. None of which are significant enough to hardcode it into character creation.[/quote]

Which is kind of my point, it’s not worth putting it into the game (beyond maybe things like beards or small traits like “glamorous” which have been suggested) but denying it exists is not only stupid beyond belief, it’s also an opinion widespread to the point I sincerely worry about the future.

This is comparable to people arguing armoured vehicles are inferior to horse cavalry.

I wish these people were trolling but I fear they sincerely roll in their collective ignorance, denial and hatred of obvious truth.

39

[quote=“ChristopherWalken, post:38, topic:6000”]Which is kind of my point, it’s not worth putting it into the game (beyond maybe things like beards or small traits like “glamorous” which have been suggested) but denying it exists is not only stupid beyond belief, it’s also an opinion widespread to the point I sincerely worry about the future.

This is comparable to people arguing armoured vehicles are inferior to horse cavalry.

I wish these people were trolling but I fear they sincerely roll in their collective ignorance, denial and hatred of obvious truth.[/quote]

Well yes and no. I believe gender bias could work, but with different character creator as well as game progression. For example if character creation revolves around more rigid templates (e.g. AD&D classes) or if stat progression exists in the game, making initial stats less significant.

Within C:DDA we have not only character creation malleable enough, but starting game stats play much greater role throughout most of the game, making gender bias less useful for this game in particular.

40

Yes, there are statistical differences between the male and female populations, but unless the character you play is sampled randomly, including those biases in the game is kind of pointless.
So in other words, if you choose a female character with a very high strength, they’re more of an outlier than a male character with equivalent stregth. I fail to see the problem with that. Making it “cost more” to make a physically stronger female character is nonsensical, since the points are based on the functional outcome, not how exceptional the character is.
Even a “random” character isn’t a random sampling from a realistic population, it’s a random assemblage of traits that attempts to very crudely provide a similar degree of pros/cons as a character that has “bought” their traits.
Hey, “statistically normal character generation” might be an interesting option, at which point you pull out the tables of height/weight/strength/coordination/intellegence/etc for the US or world population and try and map them to in-game stats, but it sounds pretty boring to implement, and not much fun to play.

Similarly, the reason not to cap e.g. max strength differently based on gender isn’t because of some absurd anti-masculinity agenda, it’s because it doesn’t make sense in the context of the game.