Women are so fantastical and otherworldy to dnd players that they needed a dlc to explain rules on what a woman is so that they can integrate it into their campaign
That's what happens when said players can't so much as greet a woman without being creepy or having a minor panic attack. Using these rules is the fastest way I've ever seen to tell everyone everywhere that you rarely leave the house.
@@PrettyTief Like I don't understand, do these people live in male only countries? I grew up with an even split of men and women and as far as I'm concerned men and women are basically the same except for a few differences. Women have higher body fat Men have better stamina That's really the only differences I can tell you. Most women in my family are 5'10", the women weigh around 185 while the men weigh 165, and they both do sports and participate on the farm and around the house almost equally. But they lift the same, run the same speed, just... less stamina.
@@LycanFerret If you look at very early war game publications it becomes apparent that many war gamers were guys who'd been in the military (a lot less common after the draft ended in the US) and so had a greater knowledge of things like military command structures. Women didn't generally have this experience or interest and of course this was taken as a sign of them "not having the mind/disposition for it". Sexism was almost completely normalized at this time, when "Take my wife, please!" was seen as the height of comedy. A lot of guys were married but still didn't really know anything about women, marrying the first or one of the first women they ever dated because that's "just the way it was done". Only to then find out they didn't really like or maybe even have many interests in common with their spouse. You can see this reflected a bit in war gamer articles from guys complaining about their wives having little to no interest in playing or understanding war games, indeed D&D was noted as a marked exception to this rule upon release. In that women (which is to say the only women these guys had regular contact with, the wives that they probably married right out of high school) actually WERE interested in playing the game.
It's really weird because Even the earliest sessions of D&D all had female players. The first art depicting people playing the game all featured women...
Knew someone who had "Chaotic Clerics use Beauty" tattooed because she thought this article was the funniest shit. It's one of those quotes that just sticks out to you lmao.
Early D&D: "Women are smaller and less muscular than men, so it makes sense for them to be limited to a lower strength score." The gnome with 18 strength: 💪
Gnome physiology and human physiology are different, also that chart doesn't show human women because in AD&D they could have the same strength as human men.
No, see, that’s different. The size difference is enough in humans to create a general wakness. But gnomes are so small they’re as dense as fucking Tungsten and thus are all significantly stronger to compensate.
@@surprisedchar2458 I'm not saying this is necessarily false, but it does have some interesting implications. 1) It must be entirely impossible for a gnome to swim. 2) Since female gnomes have a much-lowered strength cap, gnomes must be much more dimorphic than humans or elves.
18 strength short person is also why I wasn't a fan of Heavy as a keyword being a straight-up denial of weapon use for Small races. It's an easy tweak to make it strength-gated sure but still
It's also frequently used by TvTropes, a site which usually takes a feminist perspective, and I don't think they would have used a phrase with a sexist connotation as frequently as they use "Distaff Counterpart", so it probably doesn't have a strong negative connotation.
I'm also pretty sure distaff counterpart is also used for other things, including inanimate objects, not just regarding gender? Or am I mandalaing myself again?
@user-zz3sn8ky7z Well yeah, but they're still presumably mostly normal, reasonable people, and therefore not sexists (keep the "mostly" and "presumably" in mind there). I think that was the key point, not that they were pushing an agenda.
I'd seen the term 'distaff side' used to describe the side of home and family management considered "a woman's duty". I considered this a hypocritically sexist term until I learned that 'sword side' also existed to describe the side of home and family management that was considered "a man's duty". It still seemed sexist, but then I saw an example of a man who actually held to these ideas. Instead of butting in and second-guessing his wife about decisions on the 'distaff side', he abided by her judgement on those matters, while also holding the expectation that she should not second-guess decisions he made on the 'sword side'. This seemed highly unusual, but as a man, I thought it seemed fair at face value.
I once wound up with an old bag of dice. I loaned them to my cousin for a game and watched him roll terribly all night. Turns out he was rolling a twenty sided D10.
I can only speculate that the early level advantages were under the assumption that female characters are being played by someones girlfriend who is new to the game and some faster initial levels will keep them interested, untill the later levels when the boys can be superior.
Is it something to do with females developing faster in adolescence, with males catching up later? Almost makes sense until you consider that you can assume all the characters in the games are already adults
I do wonder how many players would've used these rules. Even at the time, I'm sure there were some players (male ones included) who thought these rules were unnecessary and stupid.
if i remember correctly,the original rules were kind of a mess from top to bottom. mix that with with the fact that even modern D&D rulebooks will outright tell you that the rules are just suggestions and you can pretty much do whatever you want (at least when playing casually with friends and not at some event or something) and i'm guessing very few people actually followed these rules.
Old-time gamer here. When we realized that certain rules, such as race and gender restrictions, were arbitrary and unnecessary for fun gameplay, we discarded them.
I think the only remnants that survived from this article were beauty, and to a much lesser degree "Fighting-Women". I think the fighting women mostly only survived as the level titles. Most groups, if they were gonna give female characters a penalty, usually used -4 Strength and +2 to other stats like dex or charisma. Seduction lived on as a mechanic in the famous AD&D "Sex" fan rules. But they are much more fleshed out and interesting.
I expect that most gamers used the time used the rules as written until they got experienced with the world, at which point they discarded certain specific rules.
this feels like somebody's pet project they were promised would get published, and it finally happened just around the launch of AD&D to basically check the box
Kinda silly to have a penalty to one handed weapons. Most medieval experts insist these weapons aren't that heavy, only a few pounds. If the interest is realism, the realism isn't handled well.
@@pathevermore3683 Bit of both, actually. You still need to maneuver each weapon into position. Plus the difference between the two is fuzzy. Sprinters are very dexterous- because they have large leg muscles. Seriously, take a look at Ussain Bolt.
Honestly depends. I'm fairly well built and used to do sword training. Prolonged sword drills really take a lot out of your arms and I've been at the point where my arms hurt from swinging a bastard sword around for an hour. On the other hand I know a girl with nary a muscle on her body who used to do sword-fighting with two-handed swords. It likely comes down to whether you're talking about a short encounter that is won or lost in a couple precise attacks, or a prolonged melee where you expect to be hacking away with your blade for several minutes. All of that being said: It's still bloody fantasy. While I love a certain amount of realism in my games to aid immersion, it's plain stupid to put gendered limits on how effectively classes play. In my head, all player characters got the hero gene which puts them ahead of an average person and all the statistical differences between the sexes (which are meaningless on an individual level anyway) vanish when you got the hero gene.
Eh. IF you want to include rules where women have a penalty to strength (which I wouldn't), then if does make sense to classify one-handed weapons are more difficult than their two-handed counterparts, for the simple reason that two-handed versions are not typically twice as heavy as one-handed ones, yet are wielded with roughly double the strength (one hand vs two hands). What I'm saying is that a longsword makes more sense than an arming sword for a weaker character.
"A complete set of four classes." Oh oh oh oh! I know this one! Let me guess... catgirl, bunnygirl, princess, and maid? ...oh, it's just the same classes. Well this game clearly doesn't understand women at all. Leave it to men to fail at creative forms of misogyny. Move aside, boys, let me take a crack at it... Edit: "A female character with a strength above 10 actually has a higher carrying capacity than a male character." WOMEN BE SHOPPIN' AMIRITE FELLAS?!
I don't have that much room to laugh. I ran my wife and some friends in a long running star wars campaign in the 2010s. When her character's husband knocked her up, she found out by missing a CONcheck and tossing cookies on Corean Horn"s boots.
Honestly, the fact that this mostly leans into the original rules, in 1976 pretty much explains everything. Early D&D was a hot mess with a lot of empty places where folks figured rules should be, and where most players didn't know /anyone/ who played the game outside their immediate circle, so every group figured out it's own style of play, and their own house rules, and would share them, for good or ill, via fanzines and later magazines. This is basically some guy sharing the rules he developed for his own game, leaning into common tropes in the fantasy literature available in '76. Like, why does it just assume playable orcs? This guy's local game included playable orcs.
While Len Lakofka was never formally employed by TSR, he's more than 'just some guy'. He is the author of the L series of AD&D adventure modules, and in particularly, The Secret of Bone Hill was one of the first notable non-dungeon crawl/RP-investigation based adventures published by TSR for D&D. He would also be a regular columnist for Dragon, writing the Leomund's Tiny Hut article on a monthly basis. It would have been good to include this context in the video, in my opinion.
@@HeroicMulatto Still just some guy though, in terms of being someone who mostly made things for his own games and occasionally published them - they all were back then, and it's actually not that dissimilar now. If you believe Crawford, a decent chunk of 5e has its origins at his table (although I doubt he plays anymore).
Watching this I got a mid roll UK army recruitment ad for women, which for some reason is using participation in the (only fairly recently popularised) sport of women’s football, as some kind of incentive for enlistment(?) Progress has an ugly fucking shamble to it, doesn’t it? “Come on girls, we can play the footie as good as the lads, why not sign up for the fronts while we’re at it?”
Yeah I'm from the US and we get these all the time too. There's a point where anti establishment messaging gets defanged and absorbed by the establishment when it gets popular enough
@@Maxie962 depends on the country. In UK for example all combat roles have been unisex since 2018 so... if/when we're next sending out people to get shot at, everyone's fair game.
I've read over this before and it's so cringe. I do believe the female max strength value was made in some level of response to this, though Gygax himself said he never used those at his table because he saw no purpose to the limitation in a fantasy game.
“yeah so this spell is only usable by women and it makes your opponent take off his clothes and want to have sex mid combat, but like only if you’re hot enough” Brilliant idea Jim that promotion should be in place by next week
"One that views femininity not just as a weapon, but as a deceitful weapon." What a spot on and succinct way to describe this style of female world building! It's certainly an interesting piece of DnD history, but wow, this stuff is just wild, and not in the good way.
For all that it’s the messy game design and misogyny you’d expect from original DnD, I find something really charming about how seduction and charm are narratively in this grey space between explicitly magic and just normal social skills. In a world where magic is everywhere the line between what’s magic and what’s just a neat trick probably wouldn’t be clear, and seduction would be viewed as a sort of bewitchment whether it was actually magic or not.
I've been DMing like this for years, primarily as my reason to not automatically jail the PCs every time they cast Friends. Using a spell to make someone do something for you is not actually any more intrusive or any more agency-denying than using your wits and charm (ie a good old charisma check) to persuade them to do it, and if you had to write specific mechanics for "persuade someone to do something", they'd probably look identical to Suggestion, just swapping the save for a check.
@@CountAdolfo yeah man they wrote specific mechanical outcomes for getting abducted and raped by monsters as a result of rolling seduction checks but for sure the writers of this didn’t have any weird notions about women. Do you have anything to actually add to the discussion or are you just gonna keep dribbling right wing jargon on your keyboard
Honestly, the whole “You charmed the monster so It tries to kidnap and r@pe You” sounds like something that a grim dark edgy DM would do, keep that stuff in Dark Sun
@zigmenthotep yes, very true. But, sometimes you got to be acceptable to going back to their place. My favorite trick to play after seeing a funny short, is not flipping a coin to see if said monster is a top or bottom. Should be fun next time the party bard tries using his silver tongue to persuade the werewolf pack leader against leading their little band around for monthly raids against the local villages. "well, you charmed them alright, and to your surprise they're a he not a she, *and* they're a top. Have fun with that. Roll a con save and make a smexual performance check."
AD&D was released in 1977. The 1976 article came out BEFORE AD&D. That's why it references Chainmail rules. For distance measurements, 1 inch equaled 10 feet indoors and 10 yards outdoors. Also, rules for magic users going above level 11 were presented in the Greyhawk supplement.
Wait, so spells that had a range were just more effective when used outdoors? Not only does that not make sense, it's just begging for players to argue with the DM over what does and doesn't constitute "outdoors" And what if you are indoors but the target it outdoors (or vice versa), which do you use?
@Deathnotefan97 I was never sure why the difference other than the fact that it came from Chainmail and was a way to reflect the fact that missile weapons could not arc as high indoors and so had lesser range. I know that doesn't make sense for spells, and we always houseruled as 10 feet per inch everywhere.
Yes, spell ranges were higher outdoors. Part of the justification was visibility - and, honestly, in most dungeons the longer ranges would’ve been irrelevant because none of the rooms or corridors were big enough for the longer ranges to be useful. Part of the justification was “that’s just how magic works”. Pretty sure movement rates were also in scale inches. So for the most part everything evened out and it was just needless complexity.
@@devincutler6460 the MM came out in ‘77. PH didnt come out until ‘78 and DMG in ‘79, so I think it’s safe to say nobody outside of TSR was playing AD&D before ‘78, and depending on how you define it, it before ‘79.
guys please stop replying to the ragebaiters in the comments ffs, trust me it's not good for your mental health to care about people's opinions on the internet
@@The1Ryu honestly, i'm just glad you're honest about your existence being solely defined by what gets people bemused takes a lot of the edge off when it's not a full person with the capability to wield their malignance in a way that actually matters
Ok. . .i know they never considered it but after all this maddness I have to ask: what the hell happens if your character changes sex? magic or being trans otherwise.
I was not aware of the history of the term distaff but I've definitely seen it used by women in fandom spaces at least as far back as the 80's. I don't think it had a particular pejorative association. By the 2000's it was used in a quaint parlance.
Yeah I never considered it would have had negative connotations because I only saw it come up in nerdy places like for example describing a Star Trek gender bend AU and saying distaff Spock etc. But that was probably naïve of me to forget that likening things to women has a long history of being an insult :( Still the word seems to have shrugged off any of that and be firmly a quant nerdy word everywhere it still gets used :)
@@kuraibaka9771 Exactly what I said. "Sexist" and "misogynistic" and "racist" and "Fascist" and many other words are thrown around with zero clue about what those things really mean. D&D was not sexist or racist. WotC has not "improved" the game. It wasn't cringe or racist or terrible to begin with... including sexist.
@@CountAdolfoThis very video notes how AD&D has a lower strength cap for female characters of certain races. What does this add to the game? How does it improve the experience? What, exactly, does it do, other than punish people for playing as a woman?
@@testname4464 It is a supply/demand thing. The more money they print, the less it is worth. So your buying power degrades. The 'fun' thing is, then our raises are usually small enough to barely cover the inflation rate, so they call it a 'cost of living' raise, which means it isn't a raise at all... it is just making it so you don't make less money year over year...
@@testname4464 inflation is just the rate of change. The more money is printed over time (read: the economy is growing) the less each one is worth. Deflation is therefore Bad™ because that means taking money **out** of the economy. So people would have less money to spend, thus they'd spend less because they see they have less money, and then you never get out of that cycle, since people need to spend money to save the economy when something like this happens.
These “rules” were not made by TSR. They were made by a gay friend of Gary Gygax named Len Lakofka. Nothing in Dragon Magazine was ever considered required. It was a function of community with a need for content and published without endorsement many ideas that never got to playtested. Len’s words on this *homebrew* subject of submission in Dragon Magazine, “There just wasn't any real mention of women as player characters. The vast majority of the players were males and none of them wanted a female character, especially when it came to the role play part of it. Since it was a vague area, I decided to give it some attention. No more complicated than that. I did have players who were willing to step up and play a female character. I believe that Dave Rogan playing the Magic-User Andrella. One of the Nystuls played her as well. There was a female druid and a cleric but no one tried either a thief or fighter.”
18:37 in lord of the rings female dwarf are imposible to distinguish from male dwarf(i don't know if dwarf can notice it) so if you throw that spell and succeed it means that they fell in love thinking that you were a boy
@senittoaoflightning4404 He went back and forth on the claim that they were indistinguishable. He went back and forth on a lot of things, he made a complicated world.
@@The1Ryu Yeah. I mean, think about all the complications and contradictions that exist in our world. I tend to prefer writers and world-builders who allow for that.
I played D&D in college in '78-'80. Our errata binder had more pages than the original 3 books! Thank you for this video. It was a fun blast from the past.
If you want some REALLY distasteful early D&D material, try the first few issues of White Dwarf, which included full (OK, single page) character classes like the Houri and the Pervert. Yes, a full character class called the Pervert...
Articles like that in the Dragon were not core, official rules, unless they came from the inner circle. They were generally somebody's house rules, getting more exposure as an option. Len Lakofka was a friend and got published some by TSR, but I wouldn't consider that those rules were canon. I dIdn't use them at the time. I think I capped female max strength to 17 and that was about it in representing the difference in house rules. Comeliness comes out of the 1975 sibling of D&D, Empire of the Petal Throne. I rolled that rule and the critical hit rule from EPT into my D&D game pretty quickly, before that article came out.
@@The1Ryu how can you tell? women were not really featured in OG D&D except for the illustrations of "beautiful witch" and "amazon". "fighting-man" and "patriarch" being the name for a high level cleric seem to contradict this statement.
@@pathevermore3683 Well I guess people in the 70s were just more imaginative than you, and could easily translate the titles into female equivalent like fighting-woman and Matriarch without being directly told. I can tell because if women were not allowed then one) It would say that. and two) the original play-testers wouldn't have included women including Gygax's own daughters.
@@The1Ryu "it isn't that females can't play games well, it is just that it isn't a compelling activity to them as is the case for males" -gary gygax, 2004 wow, great opinion he has of his daughters there.
@@pathevermore3683 What are you saying? That isn't an insult. He's directly saying women play as well as men. And saying it's more "compelling" to men is basically nothing more than a statistical fact, especially for back then. There were, and probably still are more male ttrpg players.
The very first games of D&D all had women as players. The first players depicted in the rulebook were women. It's wild that they thought this was okay. My OSR homebrew features Amazon's. They're basically fighter/thief.
he actually tweeted out against WoTC the other week. i can't quote him or remember what he said word-for-word, but it was just about as stupid as you think it was
My father was a panelist during V-Con 18, on writing women in fantasy and ttrpgs. The discourse was fairly toxic, but it led to a post panel party where my parents met!
I remember this rule and along with the one about treating all monsters as if they had a score of 10 makes this all simpler but still too complex. We'd just have given them the same stats as men back in the day if it had ever come up.
I haven't watched the whole video yet so you may have mentioned this but I just think it's amusing that the illustrator of that art piece that accompanies the article was the late great legend Jennell Jaquays under her birth name Paul. They used her art in this odd article about women in games decades before she would come out of the closet as a woman in gaming! Would have loved to have known her thoughts about it. Also as a side note, the author of the article Len Lakofka is probably best remembered for "The Secret of Bone Hill" adventure which had a fittingly saucy cover featuring a lady magic-user in something like a devil costume without the horns and tail.
First off, as someone who read a lot of Dragons during the 80s--Len Lekofka could over complicate making a PBJ sandwich. That was not a secret. Secondly--the video author doesn't say what the creators of D&D and authors for Dragon Magazine have to go on. D&D was published in 1974 by three guys who had a passion for miniature war gaming and scenario war gaming. D&D's closest relative was Braunstein, and that was a scenario based game about what happens in a Napoleonic era town before armies converge on it. So other than you're playing an individual character--it is completely unlike D&D. Beauty is clearly a carry over from a Braunstein stat which was sex appeal--important for securing alliances through marriage. In these very early days of D&D--these people (the creators) were spitballing ideas more than anything else. The most progressive shows on television at the time was the Mary Tyler Moore, Maude, Charlies Angels, and Nancy Drew. Soap was also definitely worth putting in this group and more than worth a watch. Maude, arguably the most progressive of the shows, lasted four seasons. So the appetite at the time was pretty short lived. Women had only had the vote for 55 years when D&D launched. The sexual revolution and second wave feminism from the late 60s was still unfolding. The fact that the folks at TSR were making an active effort to include women two years after the game was launched, especially given that their market was teen aged boys, is worth considering. And something not every game company would have bothered with.
@@andrewlustfield6079 This is a hobby where people have fun making stuff in game and trying to make meaningful differences that will impact *play*. This was called FRP at the the time for Fantasy Role Play. It was not meant to be realistic, or commentary on real things. It was by Len, who won tournaments and trophies in DnD, a SPORT that had a community to expand upon it for their own Leagues. No one really played these rules much at all - it was food for thought on people who wanted a different playstyle - and Gary saying “We need something in the magazine that will sell it!”
@@brightcrazystar93 There is nothing here I disagree with---and no doubt Len won tournaments, but when you read his articles like the Death Master--calling them overwrought is a profound understatement. My point was that in 76, though, these guys were floating ideas to fill in gaps in the game. The three white book set left a lot of room to be developed. What emerged in the AD&D PHB was pretty sensible. Women were limited in their exceptional strength scores and had bonuses to thieving skills that depended on fine motor skills. All the other ability scores were the same such as Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, etc. There was zero appreciation in the above piece for the fact that these three guys were developing a completely new type of game that no one had ever contemplated before. So, it's easy to be critical and smug and superior 50 years later when countless game companies have explored all different kinds of mechanics for fantasy, science fiction and all manner of role playing games. And it's even easier when the people you're lambasting are dead and can't defend themselves. Also, in the 1970s, as a different Hasbro counterpoint--no one even considered marketing GI Joe to young girls in their 1970-1976 run of that line of toys. So admittedly, the attitudes toward including both sexes into the game was far from perfect. The classical swords and sorcery lit that D&D was based on, most of which had been run in men's magazines like Weird Tales, had very limited roles for women. But at least the people at TSR were at least thinking about it.
I played D&D in 1976! One of the things we learned quickly is that the rules were arbitrary, needlessly complex, designed by people who had only the faintest idea of probability, and actually got in the way of roleplaying. We would usually just wing it and the DM would estimate reasonable chances on the fly. Especially pulling stuff out of The Dragon was only going to confuse everyone and fuck up the game. You're right -- there was very little quality control.
I almost made a drinking game of how many times I said "Oh No" hearing what the rules are but I quit after having to take ten sips within a minute. "Yikes" points were gonna be a gulp each and I think if I continued with it I would have ended up really sick lmao
So much work when they could have just had women characters be identical to men in every way since it's fantasy and full of a million other things that aren't like real life anyway.
@@The1RyuYeah but they could’ve just stuck with them being the same. This feels like an incredibly niche thing, since most women would probably be put off by several parts of it, and the sort of men who would see stuff like a woman being “carried off to a lair” for failing a spell as perfectly fine most likely will want to play as a man
@@gooper3644 They did stick with them being the same, that's what I just said. Lots of things in ttrpgs are niche, ttrpgs are themselves niche. You don't get to speak for women or men of anykind. Also, the monster doesn't automatically succeed in "carried off to a lair" You just seem to be complaining about failure having consequences.
Something to note, with these sorts the authors all do have some degree of sexism. Even if at best it's the sort of passive sexism where they don't think of women as lesser but just have their behavior tinted by the society they come from. Take fighter, realistically tactics, training and competency matter so much more then a persons gender and average really doesn't apply in this case. Alot of rules made for woman or men specifically seem to come from heavy assumptions as Male as the Default and female being a modifier onto that default. And thus when they go "okay, what modifiers do you get for being a woman" you proceed to get extreme cliches like this. Why do women have less strength then men "realism" (except not really), Why do they have a score measuring physical attractiveness replacing the score representing personal character, why does personal beauty seem to give literal magic and effect your relationship with deities unless your a guy and why does *literally every women* get a bonus with daggers, at best its because of cliches and at worst it's outright sexism.
@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 it literally doesn't though, especially in our elf games. Did you know I've never encountered a single situation where me being my normal ass girl self has ever mattered compared to the men around? Fancy that.
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 Me being a woman has never been brought up in any situation ever in my life, except for when clicking "Gender: F" on files and reports. I wrestled in high school, I played shooters and brawlers with my cousins, all my friends are men, and I even wear male clothes because my 55" shoulders and 32" hips don't fit in women's clothes.
Honestly, I would consider using a version of the ‘replace 1d8 for 2d6’ and ‘replace 2d10 for 3d6’ for rolling stats as a variant. Probably just say you can replace one of the ‘roll 4d6 drop the lowest’ with ‘roll 2d6 and 1d8 drop the lowest’ and replace another ‘4d6 drop the lowest’ with ‘roll 3d10 drop the lowest.’ Basically gives 1 stat that is guaranteed to be lower and one has a good chance to be higher than normally available.
God I’m so glad that in later editions they got rid of all this.. If a woman wants to play a heavy-weapons user, she shouldn’t be penalized for that If a woman wants to play a caster, she shouldn’t have to use this odd spell progression where she gets lower level spells faster but higher level spells later than her male counterpart Women (for the most part) just.. not having charisma and having “beauty” is just kinda asinine, as well as having “spells” that are written be a chronically indoor nerd’s views on women I am so glad that all got scrapped
@@leonelegenderthis a fantasy roleplaying game. Part of the “fantasy” is being able to play the characters THEY wanna play. Sometimes women are gonna wanna play women, (more often than not), and they shouldn’t be penalized for such a thing
@l_ndonmusic what I am saying is that if you wanna play a option in a game that comes with unique draw backs and bonuses and don't cry out to change the game to appease to your sensibilities, you deal with it or pick another thing.
@@leonelegender”unique drawbacks and bonuses” bro shut up 🙄 In every aspect, they’re measurably just weaker just because the designers said so, except if you wanna be locked into a thief archetype or if you wanna use “seduction” spells. Please stop acting like you genuinely think this is good… you make my eyes roll so far back into my head
... So that's why every edition of D&D say "men and women are equally capable" The worst part is that this also just reads like modern incel "how women would work in a game"
@@demolisherbpb3390 It says *if* women need to be different in a game, this is *one example* of how you can do that based on some tropes in Fantasy and Superstitions that the game is in part based on.
I had always assumed the original rules for women in D&D were going to be incredibly 'of their time'. And they are, of course... ...But by what I can only assume to be sheer game design incompetence on the part of whoever wrote the article, these rules are... Actually quite progressive for the time? Yes, women have beauty instead of Charisma, which is dumb. Yes, the charm spells are pretty yikes (almost veering into F.A.T.A.L. territory). But besides those points, I think it's actually pretty interesting that women start off weak, but grow quickly, even surpassing men in places. It almost makes picking your gender a matter of strategy, like picking your class or race. Whether or not gender differences have a place in D&D at all is, I guess, a matter of personal taste. But if you're going to have them at all, I think this is the way to do it. ...Again. Without the other weird shit.
It's not "weird shit" to suggest that more "free spirited" women would wield her sexuality as a weapon. or well... a defense mechanism. Do you know what a woman does in a combat situation, if she can't run away? She spreads her legs.
22:05 "I guess someone isn't a fan of Canadian literature" as someone with a Canadian SIN card what the heck does that mean? Is this one of those if you know you know jokes or is "Canadian literature" slang for something I've just been out of the loop on?
For someone with a Canadian Sin card, you haven't done enough of the right kind of Canadian sinning. The joke is that there are lots of bears in Canada, and the spell can only be used to charm werebears in their normal forms, not in their bear forms.
@@Rippertear I feel like a Baldur's Gate 3 reference would have been more topical. Is there a specific Canadian author I should be avoiding or is he just talking out his @$$ like we didn't write the combatant on combatant section of the Geneva checklist LOL?
@ I agree, but it is what is is. I'm not aware of any specifically Canadian ursine romance novels, I think the joke is just because people associate bears with Canada, because there are bears in Canada.
19:06 "This article severely underestimates orcish sex appeal." Not in the world of AD&D, it doesn't. Orcs didn't become green skinned hunks/muscle mommies until, I dunno, 4e? They were always described as disgusting to humans before then.
Thanks for the info. I'm still willing to give Gamescience credit for making modern d10s available in 1980, but that is an interesting thing to look at.
You know, hearing the old "-4 STR" memes, i often wondered what buff there might be to offset the game balance (assuming there was one). ...I'm honestly not sure if this is better than not knowing.
I don’t really think there’s value in criticising these sorts of things, beyond a quick “obviously this is stupid”. Everyone already knows how stupid it is, it’s very transparent, and the people who don’t think it’s stupid aren’t going to be persuaded. Yeah it’s cringe, but just calling it cringe is boring. I think it’s much more interesting to look at this from the perspective of an archeologist - exploring what life was like for nerdy boys half a century ago and how that influenced the rules systems they designed, especially in terms of what tropes they enjoyed in their fantasy stories. This was a time not much dissimilar from ours where the masculine heroic archetype was characterised by strength, courage, and faith. But by this point, a feminine heroic archetype had also developed, which was characterised by grace, liberation, and mystique, and embodied by characters like Wonder Woman and Catwoman. This was a strong archetype in its own right, female characters are not being restricted from being heroic in any way, their agency is not being limited, they’re not being presented as second-class heroes - the male gaze has only defined a heroic archetype for them that doesn’t appeal to the typical female gaze. That’s what these rules are presenting, or attempting to. Strength and combat prowess are lower because equal strength would undercut the masculine archetype; Charisma is replaced by Beauty to accentuate the contrast between the masculine and feminine archetypes’ approach to social influence; and female versions of non-magic classes pick up spells to satisfy the inherent mystique of the feminine archetype. Aside from the crazy XP values, for which I cannot speculate a reason, female characters are broadly on par with male characters, even ending up better than them in wizardry thanks to mystique. We’re not seeing here the writings of someone who believed women were inferior like we see in FATAL, we’re seeing someone who was trying to make a random character generation system result in characters matching the 20th century feminine heroic archetype. And as we follow the lifespan of D&D, we see magic archetypes moving closer to this; spellcasters gradually become weaker and worse at combat, while becoming better spellcasters, and those charm spells become staples of the enchantment school. I’d even go so far as to say that the martial/caster divide is to a certain extent a mirror of the divide between the masculine and feminine heroic archetypes exaggerated by increasing spell power - and of note, Cleric, the only caster that never really went quadratic, is also the most masculine caster, wielding melee weapons (bludgeons no less), wearing heavy armour, and casting from faith.
As you point out, early D&D was attempting a pastiche of pulp swords and sorcery, in which certain tropes were expected and in some ways, subverted. The discourse around sex and gender in early D&D via Dragon Magazine is really more nuanced than the video and many in the comments are making it out to be - or perhaps they are not aware or just don't care. For example, as early as Dragon #39 we have two articles on the subject as part of its theme "Women as Players and Characters." The first, by Jean Wells and Kim Mohan is titled "Women Want Equality - And Why Not?" which talks about women's experiences in the hobby circa 1980, criticizes "sexy armor" in female miniatures, and specifically calls out Lakofka's article from Dragon #3. This is followed by "Points to Ponder" by Kyle Gray, which begins "As a female player of Dungeons and Dragons, there is one thing that never fails to annoy me: the underestimation of the abilities of female Fighters. At times I have found it necessary to assume the role of a male character because if I chose to be female, my strength would be limited by the game rules." I agree with you that delving into the discourse of 45 years ago would have been infinitely more interesting than Zillennials patting themselves on the back about how progressive they are while pointing and laughing at the olds - all while completely ignorant of the actual history.
The magazine article was probably cleared for publication before the AD&D book came out, and a lot of us were straddling the line between basic and advanced for years.
I mean as a woman who is built like a brick shithouse (courtsey of my mother's genes )I am definetly weaker than a man of my body build would be, especially in certain scenarios. Idk, I never felt like women being depocted as physically weaker is incorrect, though instead of "Women beautiful do seductive things" I'd just swap out strengh for DEX since it's again objectively true women are better at thigs like gymnastics, that require flexibility. So like add -1 Strengh +1 dexterity and you're mostly fine. Of course whether such distinction is necessary in DND is a whole other thing (You could perhaps argue that the difference in strengh between 20 woman and 20 man is smaller than 20 man and 19 man). Especially in early college and late highschool when I used to have rock hard abs and arms the thickness of like 2/3 of my legs I'd still be weaker than your average "strong" guy, not even necessarily a fitness freak
If you look at bell curve at 3:40, it's almost the exact opposite in real life. In every attribute you can measure, men are at the more extreme low or high end of the curve where women tend to revert to the mean.
Don't forget part of the magazines goals were to simply give alternative options. People were never expected to be forced to run their game the way any given article suggested.
Shortly after the implementation of these rules… Bertha, female, orc, magic-user, with a beauty score of 5, introduces the 1st-level spell, “beer goggles”.
For those curious-Gary Gygax’s little speech at the end wasn’t _just_ indicative of how the gaming space was back in the 1970s. He held views all throughout his life that “My games are not made for women”, and in 2005 he wrote: “As a biological determinist, I am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing. In short there is no special game that will attract females--other that LARPing, which is more socialization and theatrics than gaming--and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.”
His observation on LARPers is hilariously prophetic given how theater kids are blamed for taking over and changing the game to what it is today. He wasn't entirely wrong.
modern TTRPG players seem to have a very hard time understanding that gendered mechanics can just be added mechanical variety, just like racial mechanics. with that said, holy crap the sheer levels of mess in these documents are astounding. that's some drunk thesis management level stuff.
Distaff is almost never derogatory in any usage, it's usually used in conjunction with positive or complimentary characteristics, it is at worst wholly neutral. The only way it is ever seen as offensive is in it's nature as an explicitly gendered term. So if you think the obvious fact that men and woman possess innate differences is offensive then there you go, otherwise it is no more offensive than the term "fairer sex." As far as these rules go, I have always felt people are missing the obvious parody here. This article is very clearly written in Dragon Magazines parody format, in a very similar vein to how the old Anti-Paladin concept was written up. We know their where female play-testers since at least blackmore, and earlier. With female characters being common even among male players. I other words it is likely they recieved questions about this, and thought they where being cheeky, literally look thru the art in old D&D books, female characters where fairly common. Now look at the art in this article, the character looks like a blow up doll. It is very obviously a joke article, and I don't see how so many people miss this fact. They did likely intend for people to use this, in the same way they intended for people to use the Anti-Paladin. Which people did actually do, as many tables ripped the comeliness ability score from this and applied it to everyone, in order to help distinguish charisma from your physical appearance.
Fun fact: if a fighter has a lower level of strength relative to other fighters, 2-handed swords actually make sense as a weapon of choice. Weapons like swords aren’t nearly as heavy as pop culture makes them out to be, and 2-handed swords are only slightly heavier than their 1-handed counterparts, yet you use both hands to move them around. So a 2-handed sword in most cases is actually lighter per hand. I say this as a petite person who practices historical European fencing.
I think they know what they were writing, they thought it was funny and didn't consider that this could be discussed by the richest man in the world and 0,1-1% of the world population on the Internet.
Gladiatrix might be proper Latin; I don't know. It was not yet, however, carried into English in the way gladiator was. Hollywood made "gladiator movies" back in the 1950s. The term gladiatrix wasn't used in English until the History Channel aired a documentary by that nane several years ago. So yes, gladiatrix is cooler, but it would have been unknown or tought to be a typo back in the 1970s.
As a positive thing, even if it's being referenced as a negative one, that gross quote from Gygax at the end reveals that people in (I presume?) the 70s were campaigning for "non-gender" representation in DND already, to the point that the creator was compelled to comment on it.
The exp table showing differences for female characters is wild. I wonder if it was all supposed to work like this - you invite a woman to play D&D with you (difficulty level - impossible), she is rewarded more for each encounter so there's a bigger chance she'll get into it long term and just as she stays in the group permanently, her power level starts dropping so the poor guys stop feeling emasculated and can finally be mechanically better than a girl.
It was just an intent that players should be able to make choices affecting the game mechanics of their characters. Nobody even considered the gender of the players back then, or whether people would want customizing choices that didn't have an effect on game mechanics. The idea that people wanted to be able to select character sex without it having any effect on game mechanics was once considered bizarre, as in "why would anyone do that then" bizarre.
Yeah. These were optional rules. They were not the main set for the system. By default, male and female characters were considered equal in abilities. At least as far back as ad&d 1st edition. I don't have the BD&D or Od&D boxsets anymore, so I can't check those first hand.
I was watching this video cuz I wanted a laugh, and it was quite a good one until that moment with the charm monster spell. YIKES with that one. Got funny again afterwards, though. I usually treat this kinda stuff from the history of our hobby with laughing at it because that's really all there is to do about it and the amount i feel it's worth caring. "They're dead now, who cares", basically. It's also just kinda pathetic to see people go through such efforts just to be sexist and in SUCH a nerdy way. xD Nerdy men have a very particular form of misogyny. Also that one guy in the comments really just got triggered by this video, huh. Man, what a snowflake. And they say women are the overly emotional ones. Lmao
This was an ARTICLE ! This is not official DND rules. The fact that it refers to a female orc thief shows it is clearly someone's home brew rules they shared with the community. So this person made rules for Original DnD that reflect that women are not as strong, more dexterity, and multi-tasking. And that they often use sex appeal to get their way. In other words the rules reflect REALITY! This was in 1979. We didn't bend the knee to deluded feminist that think a woman can beat a man in boxing or football. And distaff was used in an effort to use period medieval language, not as a slur.
Women are so fantastical and otherworldy to dnd players that they needed a dlc to explain rules on what a woman is so that they can integrate it into their campaign
That's what happens when said players can't so much as greet a woman without being creepy or having a minor panic attack. Using these rules is the fastest way I've ever seen to tell everyone everywhere that you rarely leave the house.
@@PrettyTief Like I don't understand, do these people live in male only countries? I grew up with an even split of men and women and as far as I'm concerned men and women are basically the same except for a few differences.
Women have higher body fat
Men have better stamina
That's really the only differences I can tell you. Most women in my family are 5'10", the women weigh around 185 while the men weigh 165, and they both do sports and participate on the farm and around the house almost equally. But they lift the same, run the same speed, just... less stamina.
@@LycanFerret If you look at very early war game publications it becomes apparent that many war gamers were guys who'd been in the military (a lot less common after the draft ended in the US) and so had a greater knowledge of things like military command structures. Women didn't generally have this experience or interest and of course this was taken as a sign of them "not having the mind/disposition for it".
Sexism was almost completely normalized at this time, when "Take my wife, please!" was seen as the height of comedy. A lot of guys were married but still didn't really know anything about women, marrying the first or one of the first women they ever dated because that's "just the way it was done". Only to then find out they didn't really like or maybe even have many interests in common with their spouse. You can see this reflected a bit in war gamer articles from guys complaining about their wives having little to no interest in playing or understanding war games, indeed D&D was noted as a marked exception to this rule upon release. In that women (which is to say the only women these guys had regular contact with, the wives that they probably married right out of high school) actually WERE interested in playing the game.
It's really weird because Even the earliest sessions of D&D all had female players. The first art depicting people playing the game all featured women...
At least back in the 70’s. We are more common in the hobby now
Knew someone who had "Chaotic Clerics use Beauty" tattooed because she thought this article was the funniest shit. It's one of those quotes that just sticks out to you lmao.
that’s an awesome tat
Imagine being that insane to get a tattoo of this
Early D&D: "Women are smaller and less muscular than men, so it makes sense for them to be limited to a lower strength score."
The gnome with 18 strength: 💪
Gnome physiology and human physiology are different, also that chart doesn't show human women because in AD&D they could have the same strength as human men.
@@The1Ryu yes, women could be fighting men. the sword is just another pen.....
No, see, that’s different. The size difference is enough in humans to create a general wakness. But gnomes are so small they’re as dense as fucking Tungsten and thus are all significantly stronger to compensate.
@@surprisedchar2458 I'm not saying this is necessarily false, but it does have some interesting implications.
1) It must be entirely impossible for a gnome to swim.
2) Since female gnomes have a much-lowered strength cap, gnomes must be much more dimorphic than humans or elves.
18 strength short person is also why I wasn't a fan of Heavy as a keyword being a straight-up denial of weapon use for Small races. It's an easy tweak to make it strength-gated sure but still
"Distaff counterpart" largely got used before the phrases "gender-flipped" or "rule 63" got popular.
It's also frequently used by TvTropes, a site which usually takes a feminist perspective, and I don't think they would have used a phrase with a sexist connotation as frequently as they use "Distaff Counterpart", so it probably doesn't have a strong negative connotation.
I'm also pretty sure distaff counterpart is also used for other things, including inanimate objects, not just regarding gender? Or am I mandalaing myself again?
@@an_hero TvTropes operates on the same basis as wikipedia, I don't think the editors have a collective "agenda" besides documenting TV tropes
@user-zz3sn8ky7z Well yeah, but they're still presumably mostly normal, reasonable people, and therefore not sexists (keep the "mostly" and "presumably" in mind there). I think that was the key point, not that they were pushing an agenda.
I'd seen the term 'distaff side' used to describe the side of home and family management considered "a woman's duty". I considered this a hypocritically sexist term until I learned that 'sword side' also existed to describe the side of home and family management that was considered "a man's duty". It still seemed sexist, but then I saw an example of a man who actually held to these ideas. Instead of butting in and second-guessing his wife about decisions on the 'distaff side', he abided by her judgement on those matters, while also holding the expectation that she should not second-guess decisions he made on the 'sword side'. This seemed highly unusual, but as a man, I thought it seemed fair at face value.
I once wound up with an old bag of dice. I loaned them to my cousin for a game and watched him roll terribly all night. Turns out he was rolling a twenty sided D10.
Ouch. Watch out for those 6 siders that are really d3s too.
I can only speculate that the early level advantages were under the assumption that female characters are being played by someones girlfriend who is new to the game and some faster initial levels will keep them interested, untill the later levels when the boys can be superior.
Is it something to do with females developing faster in adolescence, with males catching up later? Almost makes sense until you consider that you can assume all the characters in the games are already adults
I do wonder how many players would've used these rules. Even at the time, I'm sure there were some players (male ones included) who thought these rules were unnecessary and stupid.
if i remember correctly,the original rules were kind of a mess from top to bottom. mix that with with the fact that even modern D&D rulebooks will outright tell you that the rules are just suggestions and you can pretty much do whatever you want (at least when playing casually with friends and not at some event or something) and i'm guessing very few people actually followed these rules.
They weren't official rules or anything close to that, that's why they never made it into any official rule books, it was just optional flavor.
Old-time gamer here. When we realized that certain rules, such as race and gender restrictions, were arbitrary and unnecessary for fun gameplay, we discarded them.
I think the only remnants that survived from this article were beauty, and to a much lesser degree "Fighting-Women". I think the fighting women mostly only survived as the level titles. Most groups, if they were gonna give female characters a penalty, usually used -4 Strength and +2 to other stats like dex or charisma.
Seduction lived on as a mechanic in the famous AD&D "Sex" fan rules. But they are much more fleshed out and interesting.
I expect that most gamers used the time used the rules as written until they got experienced with the world, at which point they discarded certain specific rules.
God even the sexism is overly complicated
Everyone being asexual grey blobs is much simpler.
No there is also rules for thay 😢@@The1Ryu
You mean like... Women?
The sexism meta is crazy
@@yuvalgabay1023
eat the rules, divide, profit
this feels like somebody's pet project they were promised would get published, and it finally happened just around the launch of AD&D to basically check the box
Kinda silly to have a penalty to one handed weapons. Most medieval experts insist these weapons aren't that heavy, only a few pounds. If the interest is realism, the realism isn't handled well.
the youtube sword and archery communities generally point out that realistically, swords are dex weapons while bows are strength weapons.
@@pathevermore3683 Bit of both, actually. You still need to maneuver each weapon into position. Plus the difference between the two is fuzzy. Sprinters are very dexterous- because they have large leg muscles. Seriously, take a look at Ussain Bolt.
@jtreidno1 I can't, he's too fast.
Honestly depends. I'm fairly well built and used to do sword training. Prolonged sword drills really take a lot out of your arms and I've been at the point where my arms hurt from swinging a bastard sword around for an hour.
On the other hand I know a girl with nary a muscle on her body who used to do sword-fighting with two-handed swords.
It likely comes down to whether you're talking about a short encounter that is won or lost in a couple precise attacks, or a prolonged melee where you expect to be hacking away with your blade for several minutes.
All of that being said: It's still bloody fantasy. While I love a certain amount of realism in my games to aid immersion, it's plain stupid to put gendered limits on how effectively classes play. In my head, all player characters got the hero gene which puts them ahead of an average person and all the statistical differences between the sexes (which are meaningless on an individual level anyway) vanish when you got the hero gene.
Eh. IF you want to include rules where women have a penalty to strength (which I wouldn't), then if does make sense to classify one-handed weapons are more difficult than their two-handed counterparts, for the simple reason that two-handed versions are not typically twice as heavy as one-handed ones, yet are wielded with roughly double the strength (one hand vs two hands).
What I'm saying is that a longsword makes more sense than an arming sword for a weaker character.
"A complete set of four classes."
Oh oh oh oh! I know this one! Let me guess... catgirl, bunnygirl, princess, and maid?
...oh, it's just the same classes. Well this game clearly doesn't understand women at all. Leave it to men to fail at creative forms of misogyny. Move aside, boys, let me take a crack at it...
Edit: "A female character with a strength above 10 actually has a higher carrying capacity than a male character." WOMEN BE SHOPPIN' AMIRITE FELLAS?!
LMAO!
I don't have that much room to laugh. I ran my wife and some friends in a long running star wars campaign in the 2010s.
When her character's husband knocked her up, she found out by missing a CONcheck and tossing cookies on Corean Horn"s boots.
Honestly, the fact that this mostly leans into the original rules, in 1976 pretty much explains everything.
Early D&D was a hot mess with a lot of empty places where folks figured rules should be, and where most players didn't know /anyone/ who played the game outside their immediate circle, so every group figured out it's own style of play, and their own house rules, and would share them, for good or ill, via fanzines and later magazines.
This is basically some guy sharing the rules he developed for his own game, leaning into common tropes in the fantasy literature available in '76. Like, why does it just assume playable orcs? This guy's local game included playable orcs.
While Len Lakofka was never formally employed by TSR, he's more than 'just some guy'. He is the author of the L series of AD&D adventure modules, and in particularly, The Secret of Bone Hill was one of the first notable non-dungeon crawl/RP-investigation based adventures published by TSR for D&D. He would also be a regular columnist for Dragon, writing the Leomund's Tiny Hut article on a monthly basis. It would have been good to include this context in the video, in my opinion.
@@HeroicMulatto Still just some guy though, in terms of being someone who mostly made things for his own games and occasionally published them - they all were back then, and it's actually not that dissimilar now. If you believe Crawford, a decent chunk of 5e has its origins at his table (although I doubt he plays anymore).
@@yurisei6732 Fair. I concede your point.
Watching this I got a mid roll UK army recruitment ad for women, which for some reason is using participation in the (only fairly recently popularised) sport of women’s football, as some kind of incentive for enlistment(?)
Progress has an ugly fucking shamble to it, doesn’t it?
“Come on girls, we can play the footie as good as the lads, why not sign up for the fronts while we’re at it?”
No woman gets sent to the front lines.
Yeah I'm from the US and we get these all the time too. There's a point where anti establishment messaging gets defanged and absorbed by the establishment when it gets popular enough
@@Maxie962 Not yet
Clearly the better recruitment push is "Fight enough to gain 4 levels and you'll be able to send men catatonic!"
@@Maxie962 depends on the country. In UK for example all combat roles have been unisex since 2018 so... if/when we're next sending out people to get shot at, everyone's fair game.
I've read over this before and it's so cringe. I do believe the female max strength value was made in some level of response to this, though Gygax himself said he never used those at his table because he saw no purpose to the limitation in a fantasy game.
“yeah so this spell is only usable by women and it makes your opponent take off his clothes and want to have sex mid combat, but like only if you’re hot enough”
Brilliant idea Jim that promotion should be in place by next week
"One that views femininity not just as a weapon, but as a deceitful weapon." What a spot on and succinct way to describe this style of female world building! It's certainly an interesting piece of DnD history, but wow, this stuff is just wild, and not in the good way.
Woman in my DnD game? More likely than you think.
I'm a woman and this sounds like a blast if you're into having a smutty RPG night, I just wouldn't invite any of the men who wrote this, ever.
For all that it’s the messy game design and misogyny you’d expect from original DnD, I find something really charming about how seduction and charm are narratively in this grey space between explicitly magic and just normal social skills. In a world where magic is everywhere the line between what’s magic and what’s just a neat trick probably wouldn’t be clear, and seduction would be viewed as a sort of bewitchment whether it was actually magic or not.
lol
I've been DMing like this for years, primarily as my reason to not automatically jail the PCs every time they cast Friends. Using a spell to make someone do something for you is not actually any more intrusive or any more agency-denying than using your wits and charm (ie a good old charisma check) to persuade them to do it, and if you had to write specific mechanics for "persuade someone to do something", they'd probably look identical to Suggestion, just swapping the save for a check.
It was not misogynistic. You're just way too sensitive... Woke, even
@@CountAdolfo yeah man they wrote specific mechanical outcomes for getting abducted and raped by monsters as a result of rolling seduction checks but for sure the writers of this didn’t have any weird notions about women. Do you have anything to actually add to the discussion or are you just gonna keep dribbling right wing jargon on your keyboard
Honestly, the whole “You charmed the monster so It tries to kidnap and r@pe You” sounds like something that a grim dark edgy DM would do, keep that stuff in Dark Sun
Man, I'm sure some people think this is the version of Charm Monster all bards should have.
That would be the version where the caster carries the monster off to their lair.
@zigmenthotep yes, very true. But, sometimes you got to be acceptable to going back to their place.
My favorite trick to play after seeing a funny short, is not flipping a coin to see if said monster is a top or bottom.
Should be fun next time the party bard tries using his silver tongue to persuade the werewolf pack leader against leading their little band around for monthly raids against the local villages. "well, you charmed them alright, and to your surprise they're a he not a she, *and* they're a top. Have fun with that. Roll a con save and make a smexual performance check."
AD&D was released in 1977. The 1976 article came out BEFORE AD&D. That's why it references Chainmail rules.
For distance measurements, 1 inch equaled 10 feet indoors and 10 yards outdoors.
Also, rules for magic users going above level 11 were presented in the Greyhawk supplement.
Wait, so spells that had a range were just more effective when used outdoors?
Not only does that not make sense, it's just begging for players to argue with the DM over what does and doesn't constitute "outdoors"
And what if you are indoors but the target it outdoors (or vice versa), which do you use?
@Deathnotefan97 I was never sure why the difference other than the fact that it came from Chainmail and was a way to reflect the fact that missile weapons could not arc as high indoors and so had lesser range. I know that doesn't make sense for spells, and we always houseruled as 10 feet per inch everywhere.
Yes, spell ranges were higher outdoors. Part of the justification was visibility - and, honestly, in most dungeons the longer ranges would’ve been irrelevant because none of the rooms or corridors were big enough for the longer ranges to be useful. Part of the justification was “that’s just how magic works”. Pretty sure movement rates were also in scale inches. So for the most part everything evened out and it was just needless complexity.
@@devincutler6460 the MM came out in ‘77. PH didnt come out until ‘78 and DMG in ‘79, so I think it’s safe to say nobody outside of TSR was playing AD&D before ‘78, and depending on how you define it, it before ‘79.
guys please stop replying to the ragebaiters in the comments ffs, trust me it's not good for your mental health to care about people's opinions on the internet
ragebaiters = different opinion
@@The1Ryuthank you for being a demonstration of who exactly they’re talking about
@@l_ndonmusic People with different opinions, ya, I know.
@@The1Ryu yeah, ragebaiters, like the guy said.
@@The1Ryu honestly, i'm just glad you're honest about your existence being solely defined by what gets people bemused
takes a lot of the edge off when it's not a full person with the capability to wield their malignance in a way that actually matters
Ok. . .i know they never considered it but after all this maddness I have to ask: what the hell happens if your character changes sex? magic or being trans otherwise.
Being trans do not change your biology, magic is magic
I really think this was the peak of imagination they have yet to develop at the time. Love it that DND feels a lot more inclusive these days.
Reminds me of a certain magic girdle in the first Baldur's Gate game.
@@Sara-sn5gd it really became a gray slop with all edges saw off, games for the "modern audiences" is a mistake
@@dragonkingofthestars being trans wouldn't change your biology and stats, magic might
I was not aware of the history of the term distaff but I've definitely seen it used by women in fandom spaces at least as far back as the 80's. I don't think it had a particular pejorative association. By the 2000's it was used in a quaint parlance.
Yeah I never considered it would have had negative connotations because I only saw it come up in nerdy places like for example describing a Star Trek gender bend AU and saying distaff Spock etc.
But that was probably naïve of me to forget that likening things to women has a long history of being an insult :( Still the word seems to have shrugged off any of that and be firmly a quant nerdy word everywhere it still gets used :)
"Dungeons and Dragons is sexist!"
"Nuh-uh! Look, there's even stats for... Nevermind."
Still not sexist
It's not. Never was. You see sexism EVERYWHERE
@@CountAdolfoWhat are you trying to say?
@@kuraibaka9771 Exactly what I said.
"Sexist" and "misogynistic" and "racist" and "Fascist" and many other words are thrown around with zero clue about what those things really mean. D&D was not sexist or racist. WotC has not "improved" the game. It wasn't cringe or racist or terrible to begin with... including sexist.
@@CountAdolfoThis very video notes how AD&D has a lower strength cap for female characters of certain races. What does this add to the game? How does it improve the experience? What, exactly, does it do, other than punish people for playing as a woman?
I just think it gnarly that The Dragon magazine was $1.50 back then...
that's like $8 or so in 2020s money.
Inflation really is a load of horseshit, companies just charge more because they can
@@testname4464 It is a supply/demand thing. The more money they print, the less it is worth. So your buying power degrades. The 'fun' thing is, then our raises are usually small enough to barely cover the inflation rate, so they call it a 'cost of living' raise, which means it isn't a raise at all... it is just making it so you don't make less money year over year...
@@testname4464 all of capitalism is a scam.
@@testname4464 inflation is just the rate of change. The more money is printed over time (read: the economy is growing) the less each one is worth. Deflation is therefore Bad™ because that means taking money **out** of the economy. So people would have less money to spend, thus they'd spend less because they see they have less money, and then you never get out of that cycle, since people need to spend money to save the economy when something like this happens.
These “rules” were not made by TSR. They were made by a gay friend of Gary Gygax named Len Lakofka. Nothing in Dragon Magazine was ever considered required. It was a function of community with a need for content and published without endorsement many ideas that never got to playtested. Len’s words on this *homebrew* subject of submission in Dragon Magazine, “There just wasn't any real mention of women as player characters. The vast majority of the players were males and none of them wanted a female character, especially when it came to the role play part of it. Since it was a vague area, I decided to give it some attention. No more complicated than that. I did have players who were willing to step up and play a female character. I believe that Dave Rogan playing the Magic-User Andrella. One of the Nystuls played her as well. There was a female druid and a cleric but no one tried either a thief or fighter.”
Thank you, now I can use the argument, "If you don't like these rules then you're a homophobe!" LOL
@@The1Ryu really? you gonna be strightphobic like that?
@@pathevermore3683dafuq u on about
This puts the death of the thief black leaf the thief in a whole new life.
Imagine going this far out of your way for bad design... in order to make some kind of point? IDK, that's what this feels like.
you mean F.A.T.A.L?
@@stingyyyyy2250 lol. At least the writer of this article isn't going out of his way to justify his poor design. 🤣🤣🤣
18:37 in lord of the rings female dwarf are imposible to distinguish from male dwarf(i don't know if dwarf can notice it) so if you throw that spell and succeed it means that they fell in love thinking that you were a boy
D&D was inspired by Tolkien's work, but it was by no mean beholden to inconsistent things he wrote in different appendices.
@@The1Ryu What is inconsistent about "male and female dwarfs are indistinguishable"?
@senittoaoflightning4404 He went back and forth on the claim that they were indistinguishable. He went back and forth on a lot of things, he made a complicated world.
@@The1Ryu Yeah. I mean, think about all the complications and contradictions that exist in our world. I tend to prefer writers and world-builders who allow for that.
@@BilboJack I'm not criticizing him for it.
I played D&D in college in '78-'80. Our errata binder had more pages than the original 3 books!
Thank you for this video. It was a fun blast from the past.
If you want some REALLY distasteful early D&D material, try the first few issues of White Dwarf, which included full (OK, single page) character classes like the Houri and the Pervert. Yes, a full character class called the Pervert...
Mmhmm, it was a joke. People used to enjoy those.
That’s because the people the jokes degraded were afraid to speak up.
@@TessaBurke-d1u You think white men in the 70s were afraid to speak up? Okay.
@@The1Ryu 70's white men were houri?
What in hell is a houri?
Articles like that in the Dragon were not core, official rules, unless they came from the inner circle. They were generally somebody's house rules, getting more exposure as an option. Len Lakofka was a friend and got published some by TSR, but I wouldn't consider that those rules were canon. I dIdn't use them at the time. I think I capped female max strength to 17 and that was about it in representing the difference in house rules. Comeliness comes out of the 1975 sibling of D&D, Empire of the Petal Throne. I rolled that rule and the critical hit rule from EPT into my D&D game pretty quickly, before that article came out.
Lowkey playing a chaotic female thief sounds kinda fun
Ya, it was supposed to being interesting flavor to the female characters. Original D&D had no different between male and female characters.
@@The1Ryu how can you tell? women were not really featured in OG D&D except for the illustrations of "beautiful witch" and "amazon". "fighting-man" and "patriarch" being the name for a high level cleric seem to contradict this statement.
@@pathevermore3683 Well I guess people in the 70s were just more imaginative than you, and could easily translate the titles into female equivalent like fighting-woman and Matriarch without being directly told.
I can tell because if women were not allowed then one) It would say that. and two) the original play-testers wouldn't have included women including Gygax's own daughters.
@@The1Ryu "it isn't that females can't play games well, it is just that it isn't a compelling activity to them as is the case for males" -gary gygax, 2004 wow, great opinion he has of his daughters there.
@@pathevermore3683 What are you saying? That isn't an insult. He's directly saying women play as well as men. And saying it's more "compelling" to men is basically nothing more than a statistical fact, especially for back then. There were, and probably still are more male ttrpg players.
Carries her off to his lair...
Do I roll up a new character or are we gonna "roleplay"?
Hmm... Gross... I'll allow it.
lol
Gives you new reason to roll up a new character, please welcome Fangar the Destroyer, Werewolf Fighter
The very first games of D&D all had women as players. The first players depicted in the rulebook were women.
It's wild that they thought this was okay.
My OSR homebrew features Amazon's. They're basically fighter/thief.
is that so? well now im curious, know where i can read about that?
2:15 Wow, I had no idea Korean MMORPGs were _that_ old!
POV: Elon Musk buys WoTC
+1
+2
+3
+4
he actually tweeted out against WoTC the other week. i can't quote him or remember what he said word-for-word, but it was just about as stupid as you think it was
My father was a panelist during V-Con 18, on writing women in fantasy and ttrpgs. The discourse was fairly toxic, but it led to a post panel party where my parents met!
23:49 levels = hit dice as default
I remember this rule and along with the one about treating all monsters as if they had a score of 10 makes this all simpler but still too complex. We'd just have given them the same stats as men back in the day if it had ever come up.
Oh, that's what distaff means? I thought it was because women y'know... don't have a staff.
I'm a woman and that's what I thought too...
We're allowed to have them, as a queer treat.
SAME, that was my EXACT thought before they explained it 😂
Even funnier is that the male version of something traditionally female is referred to as the "spear counterpart."
counter point: trans and intersex women.
I haven't watched the whole video yet so you may have mentioned this but I just think it's amusing that the illustrator of that art piece that accompanies the article was the late great legend Jennell Jaquays under her birth name Paul. They used her art in this odd article about women in games decades before she would come out of the closet as a woman in gaming! Would have loved to have known her thoughts about it.
Also as a side note, the author of the article Len Lakofka is probably best remembered for "The Secret of Bone Hill" adventure which had a fittingly saucy cover featuring a lady magic-user in something like a devil costume without the horns and tail.
20:14 treat all monsters as if they had a score of 10.
First off, as someone who read a lot of Dragons during the 80s--Len Lekofka could over complicate making a PBJ sandwich. That was not a secret.
Secondly--the video author doesn't say what the creators of D&D and authors for Dragon Magazine have to go on. D&D was published in 1974 by three guys who had a passion for miniature war gaming and scenario war gaming. D&D's closest relative was Braunstein, and that was a scenario based game about what happens in a Napoleonic era town before armies converge on it. So other than you're playing an individual character--it is completely unlike D&D.
Beauty is clearly a carry over from a Braunstein stat which was sex appeal--important for securing alliances through marriage.
In these very early days of D&D--these people (the creators) were spitballing ideas more than anything else. The most progressive shows on television at the time was the Mary Tyler Moore, Maude, Charlies Angels, and Nancy Drew. Soap was also definitely worth putting in this group and more than worth a watch. Maude, arguably the most progressive of the shows, lasted four seasons. So the appetite at the time was pretty short lived.
Women had only had the vote for 55 years when D&D launched. The sexual revolution and second wave feminism from the late 60s was still unfolding. The fact that the folks at TSR were making an active effort to include women two years after the game was launched, especially given that their market was teen aged boys, is worth considering. And something not every game company would have bothered with.
@@andrewlustfield6079 This is a hobby where people have fun making stuff in game and trying to make meaningful differences that will impact *play*. This was called FRP at the the time for Fantasy Role Play. It was not meant to be realistic, or commentary on real things. It was by Len, who won tournaments and trophies in DnD, a SPORT that had a community to expand upon it for their own Leagues. No one really played these rules much at all - it was food for thought on people who wanted a different playstyle - and Gary saying “We need something in the magazine that will sell it!”
@@brightcrazystar93 There is nothing here I disagree with---and no doubt Len won tournaments, but when you read his articles like the Death Master--calling them overwrought is a profound understatement.
My point was that in 76, though, these guys were floating ideas to fill in gaps in the game. The three white book set left a lot of room to be developed.
What emerged in the AD&D PHB was pretty sensible. Women were limited in their exceptional strength scores and had bonuses to thieving skills that depended on fine motor skills. All the other ability scores were the same such as Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, etc.
There was zero appreciation in the above piece for the fact that these three guys were developing a completely new type of game that no one had ever contemplated before.
So, it's easy to be critical and smug and superior 50 years later when countless game companies have explored all different kinds of mechanics for fantasy, science fiction and all manner of role playing games. And it's even easier when the people you're lambasting are dead and can't defend themselves.
Also, in the 1970s, as a different Hasbro counterpoint--no one even considered marketing GI Joe to young girls in their 1970-1976 run of that line of toys.
So admittedly, the attitudes toward including both sexes into the game was far from perfect. The classical swords and sorcery lit that D&D was based on, most of which had been run in men's magazines like Weird Tales, had very limited roles for women. But at least the people at TSR were at least thinking about it.
I played D&D in 1976! One of the things we learned quickly is that the rules were arbitrary, needlessly complex, designed by people who had only the faintest idea of probability, and actually got in the way of roleplaying. We would usually just wing it and the DM would estimate reasonable chances on the fly. Especially pulling stuff out of The Dragon was only going to confuse everyone and fuck up the game. You're right -- there was very little quality control.
I almost made a drinking game of how many times I said "Oh No" hearing what the rules are but I quit after having to take ten sips within a minute. "Yikes" points were gonna be a gulp each and I think if I continued with it I would have ended up really sick lmao
So much work when they could have just had women characters be identical to men in every way since it's fantasy and full of a million other things that aren't like real life anyway.
kind of a dick way to word that but ok.
They did have that in the original rules and that continued in most major editions.
@@The1RyuYeah but they could’ve just stuck with them being the same. This feels like an incredibly niche thing, since most women would probably be put off by several parts of it, and the sort of men who would see stuff like a woman being “carried off to a lair” for failing a spell as perfectly fine most likely will want to play as a man
@@gooper3644 They did stick with them being the same, that's what I just said. Lots of things in ttrpgs are niche, ttrpgs are themselves niche. You don't get to speak for women or men of anykind. Also, the monster doesn't automatically succeed in "carried off to a lair" You just seem to be complaining about failure having consequences.
Something to note, with these sorts the authors all do have some degree of sexism. Even if at best it's the sort of passive sexism where they don't think of women as lesser but just have their behavior tinted by the society they come from.
Take fighter, realistically tactics, training and competency matter so much more then a persons gender and average really doesn't apply in this case.
Alot of rules made for woman or men specifically seem to come from heavy assumptions as Male as the Default and female being a modifier onto that default. And thus when they go "okay, what modifiers do you get for being a woman" you proceed to get extreme cliches like this.
Why do women have less strength then men "realism" (except not really), Why do they have a score measuring physical attractiveness replacing the score representing personal character, why does personal beauty seem to give literal magic and effect your relationship with deities unless your a guy and why does *literally every women* get a bonus with daggers, at best its because of cliches and at worst it's outright sexism.
Or... this was just something some people thought was a fun addition to the game and you're just a psycho.
@The1Ryu ah yes, name calling. What an articulate and mature response.
@@hugswanted7954 LOL! If missing the point was an olympic sport you'd get the gold.
@@The1Ryu ah yes, repeat the previous. I'm not sure one can miss the point if what was said has nothing of substance.
@@hugswanted7954 Did you type this while staring in a mirror? LOL
Beauty acts a lot like a stand in this.
Her Stand, 『If Looks Could Kill 』, has no weaknesses!
All of this work and added complexity could have been easily side stepped if they had stumbled on the amazing concept that gender shouldn't matter. 💥
But it matters in more things you could ever imagine.
@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 it literally doesn't though, especially in our elf games. Did you know I've never encountered a single situation where me being my normal ass girl self has ever mattered compared to the men around? Fancy that.
@@obscuritymage I can believe few people read fairy tales.
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 are you lost? You're on a UA-cam page dedicated to talking about elf games. You're either a bot or a dumbass.
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 Me being a woman has never been brought up in any situation ever in my life, except for when clicking "Gender: F" on files and reports. I wrestled in high school, I played shooters and brawlers with my cousins, all my friends are men, and I even wear male clothes because my 55" shoulders and 32" hips don't fit in women's clothes.
Honestly, I would consider using a version of the ‘replace 1d8 for 2d6’ and ‘replace 2d10 for 3d6’ for rolling stats as a variant. Probably just say you can replace one of the ‘roll 4d6 drop the lowest’ with ‘roll 2d6 and 1d8 drop the lowest’ and replace another ‘4d6 drop the lowest’ with ‘roll 3d10 drop the lowest.’ Basically gives 1 stat that is guaranteed to be lower and one has a good chance to be higher than normally available.
God I’m so glad that in later editions they got rid of all this..
If a woman wants to play a heavy-weapons user, she shouldn’t be penalized for that
If a woman wants to play a caster, she shouldn’t have to use this odd spell progression where she gets lower level spells faster but higher level spells later than her male counterpart
Women (for the most part) just.. not having charisma and having “beauty” is just kinda asinine, as well as having “spells” that are written be a chronically indoor nerd’s views on women
I am so glad that all got scrapped
If women want to play those couldn't they make men characters? It's not like you cannot make another gender than yours
@@leonelegenderthis a fantasy roleplaying game. Part of the “fantasy” is being able to play the characters THEY wanna play. Sometimes women are gonna wanna play women, (more often than not), and they shouldn’t be penalized for such a thing
@l_ndonmusic what I am saying is that if you wanna play a option in a game that comes with unique draw backs and bonuses and don't cry out to change the game to appease to your sensibilities, you deal with it or pick another thing.
@@leonelegenderWhy are you so pathetic ?
@@leonelegender”unique drawbacks and bonuses” bro shut up 🙄
In every aspect, they’re measurably just weaker just because the designers said so, except if you wanna be locked into a thief archetype or if you wanna use “seduction” spells.
Please stop acting like you genuinely think this is good… you make my eyes roll so far back into my head
So glad to know this silly nonsense wasn't official.
... So that's why every edition of D&D say "men and women are equally capable"
The worst part is that this also just reads like modern incel "how women would work in a game"
@@demolisherbpb3390 It says *if* women need to be different in a game, this is *one example* of how you can do that based on some tropes in Fantasy and Superstitions that the game is in part based on.
I had always assumed the original rules for women in D&D were going to be incredibly 'of their time'. And they are, of course... ...But by what I can only assume to be sheer game design incompetence on the part of whoever wrote the article, these rules are... Actually quite progressive for the time?
Yes, women have beauty instead of Charisma, which is dumb. Yes, the charm spells are pretty yikes (almost veering into F.A.T.A.L. territory). But besides those points, I think it's actually pretty interesting that women start off weak, but grow quickly, even surpassing men in places. It almost makes picking your gender a matter of strategy, like picking your class or race.
Whether or not gender differences have a place in D&D at all is, I guess, a matter of personal taste. But if you're going to have them at all, I think this is the way to do it.
...Again. Without the other weird shit.
It's not "weird shit" to suggest that more "free spirited" women would wield her sexuality as a weapon. or well... a defense mechanism. Do you know what a woman does in a combat situation, if she can't run away? She spreads her legs.
@@Maxie962lmao. Ikr, I see it all the time. Olympic boxing is like corn with all the leg spreading.
26:21 clearly it works on 4e logic and is usable at will by exotic fae creatures
Those Seduction spells return with the Witch class in a later issue.
22:05 "I guess someone isn't a fan of Canadian literature" as someone with a Canadian SIN card what the heck does that mean?
Is this one of those if you know you know jokes or is "Canadian literature" slang for something I've just been out of the loop on?
For someone with a Canadian Sin card, you haven't done enough of the right kind of Canadian sinning. The joke is that there are lots of bears in Canada, and the spell can only be used to charm werebears in their normal forms, not in their bear forms.
@@Rippertear I feel like a Baldur's Gate 3 reference would have been more topical.
Is there a specific Canadian author I should be avoiding or is he just talking out his @$$ like we didn't write the combatant on combatant section of the Geneva checklist LOL?
@ I agree, but it is what is is. I'm not aware of any specifically Canadian ursine romance novels, I think the joke is just because people associate bears with Canada, because there are bears in Canada.
@@janschievink1586 Halsin would not approve.
@@Rippertear If I'm being honest I'm just pretending to be angry as a framing device because I like calling it the Geneva checklist.
This seems about the same amount of quality as the average DMs guild homebrew. Which is to say, terrible and convoluted.
What word has been concealed at 15:46?
Probably a slur for Romani people
You can see it at 0:45
19:06 "This article severely underestimates orcish sex appeal."
Not in the world of AD&D, it doesn't. Orcs didn't become green skinned hunks/muscle mommies until, I dunno, 4e? They were always described as disgusting to humans before then.
d10s were not invented in 1980, wikipedia has linked a 1906 patent for one on their page for Pentagonal trapezohedron
Thanks for the info. I'm still willing to give Gamescience credit for making modern d10s available in 1980, but that is an interesting thing to look at.
Is this where Byron Hall got his inspiration for FATAL?
I think any speculation into the mental state of the person who made fatal is a road to disaster.
Maybe he looked in to natural world and decided to simulate nature.
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 Boring! I wanna play as a badass warrior woman!
@rommdan2716 who stops you?
@@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115 I take it you've never read the rules for FATAL if you believe that.
Why do they even need alternate classes.
They were just level titles, and they weren't needed, it was just fun color.
You know, hearing the old "-4 STR" memes, i often wondered what buff there might be to offset the game balance (assuming there was one).
...I'm honestly not sure if this is better than not knowing.
I don’t really think there’s value in criticising these sorts of things, beyond a quick “obviously this is stupid”. Everyone already knows how stupid it is, it’s very transparent, and the people who don’t think it’s stupid aren’t going to be persuaded. Yeah it’s cringe, but just calling it cringe is boring. I think it’s much more interesting to look at this from the perspective of an archeologist - exploring what life was like for nerdy boys half a century ago and how that influenced the rules systems they designed, especially in terms of what tropes they enjoyed in their fantasy stories.
This was a time not much dissimilar from ours where the masculine heroic archetype was characterised by strength, courage, and faith. But by this point, a feminine heroic archetype had also developed, which was characterised by grace, liberation, and mystique, and embodied by characters like Wonder Woman and Catwoman. This was a strong archetype in its own right, female characters are not being restricted from being heroic in any way, their agency is not being limited, they’re not being presented as second-class heroes - the male gaze has only defined a heroic archetype for them that doesn’t appeal to the typical female gaze.
That’s what these rules are presenting, or attempting to. Strength and combat prowess are lower because equal strength would undercut the masculine archetype; Charisma is replaced by Beauty to accentuate the contrast between the masculine and feminine archetypes’ approach to social influence; and female versions of non-magic classes pick up spells to satisfy the inherent mystique of the feminine archetype. Aside from the crazy XP values, for which I cannot speculate a reason, female characters are broadly on par with male characters, even ending up better than them in wizardry thanks to mystique.
We’re not seeing here the writings of someone who believed women were inferior like we see in FATAL, we’re seeing someone who was trying to make a random character generation system result in characters matching the 20th century feminine heroic archetype. And as we follow the lifespan of D&D, we see magic archetypes moving closer to this; spellcasters gradually become weaker and worse at combat, while becoming better spellcasters, and those charm spells become staples of the enchantment school. I’d even go so far as to say that the martial/caster divide is to a certain extent a mirror of the divide between the masculine and feminine heroic archetypes exaggerated by increasing spell power - and of note, Cleric, the only caster that never really went quadratic, is also the most masculine caster, wielding melee weapons (bludgeons no less), wearing heavy armour, and casting from faith.
As you point out, early D&D was attempting a pastiche of pulp swords and sorcery, in which certain tropes were expected and in some ways, subverted. The discourse around sex and gender in early D&D via Dragon Magazine is really more nuanced than the video and many in the comments are making it out to be - or perhaps they are not aware or just don't care. For example, as early as Dragon #39 we have two articles on the subject as part of its theme "Women as Players and Characters." The first, by Jean Wells and Kim Mohan is titled "Women Want Equality - And Why Not?" which talks about women's experiences in the hobby circa 1980, criticizes "sexy armor" in female miniatures, and specifically calls out Lakofka's article from Dragon #3. This is followed by "Points to Ponder" by Kyle Gray, which begins "As a female player of Dungeons and Dragons, there is one thing that never fails to annoy me: the underestimation of the abilities of female Fighters. At times I have found it necessary to assume the role of a male character because if I chose to be female, my strength would be limited by the game rules."
I agree with you that delving into the discourse of 45 years ago would have been infinitely more interesting than Zillennials patting themselves on the back about how progressive they are while pointing and laughing at the olds - all while completely ignorant of the actual history.
Thank you both for this.
@@HeroicMulatto the bone lead started setting in _immediately_ after you finished at that first paragraph, huh
@@hi-i-am-atan I'm not sure what you mean by "bone lead".
@@HeroicMulatto y'know, the lead in your bones. which is slowly becoming the lead not in your bones, and not in a good way
"Distaff gamer" just makes me want to play a character who has a distaff as a magical focus. Or better yet, a weapon.
The drawing of the PC is so scrungly, I love her.
The magazine article was probably cleared for publication before the AD&D book came out, and a lot of us were straddling the line between basic and advanced for years.
Gee, and I thought female characters in 1st edition AD&D having less strength than male characters was bad.
I mean as a woman who is built like a brick shithouse (courtsey of my mother's genes )I am definetly weaker than a man of my body build would be, especially in certain scenarios.
Idk, I never felt like women being depocted as physically weaker is incorrect, though instead of "Women beautiful do seductive things" I'd just swap out strengh for DEX since it's again objectively true women are better at thigs like gymnastics, that require flexibility. So like add -1 Strengh +1 dexterity and you're mostly fine. Of course whether such distinction is necessary in DND is a whole other thing (You could perhaps argue that the difference in strengh between 20 woman and 20 man is smaller than 20 man and 19 man).
Especially in early college and late highschool when I used to have rock hard abs and arms the thickness of like 2/3 of my legs I'd still be weaker than your average "strong" guy, not even necessarily a fitness freak
So THAT explains the "-4 STR" thing...
If you look at bell curve at 3:40, it's almost the exact opposite in real life. In every attribute you can measure, men are at the more extreme low or high end of the curve where women tend to revert to the mean.
Thanks!
Don't forget part of the magazines goals were to simply give alternative options. People were never expected to be forced to run their game the way any given article suggested.
22:05
Haha! Chuck Tingle reference...
Nope, even more obscure.
Although I understand why you might think that, considering that there are five Chuck Tingle books visible in this video.
@zigmenthotep What do you mean "Pounded in the butt by a handsome Bearman that plays DnD" It's not an actual book?
@@zigmenthotepI mean, Chuck Tingle IS the greatest author since Billy "the bard" Shakespeare.
Shortly after the implementation of these rules…
Bertha, female, orc, magic-user, with a beauty score of 5, introduces the 1st-level spell, “beer goggles”.
is Bear well known? I only know of it from GenerallyPooky
Most people know about it probably from the Tumblr post
For those curious-Gary Gygax’s little speech at the end wasn’t _just_ indicative of how the gaming space was back in the 1970s. He held views all throughout his life that “My games are not made for women”, and in 2005 he wrote:
“As a biological determinist, I am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing. In short there is no special game that will attract females--other that LARPing, which is more socialization and theatrics than gaming--and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.”
His observation on LARPers is hilariously prophetic given how theater kids are blamed for taking over and changing the game to what it is today. He wasn't entirely wrong.
God i love the things nerdy men write about girls
SAME
I know right, so much less sexist then the things women write about boys.
@@The1Ryu like what? what do women wright that make you cry like a snowflake?
Okay, there is virtually no defense here, but, um... wrOte?
@@TinyLadyKris it's so funny
modern TTRPG players seem to have a very hard time understanding that gendered mechanics can just be added mechanical variety, just like racial mechanics.
with that said, holy crap the sheer levels of mess in these documents are astounding. that's some drunk thesis management level stuff.
This is so cool, I really need to convert this to Pathfinder 1e rules.
Didn’t think of all those negatives…
Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have started e?
Nah, e is good :3
Distaff is almost never derogatory in any usage, it's usually used in conjunction with positive or complimentary characteristics, it is at worst wholly neutral. The only way it is ever seen as offensive is in it's nature as an explicitly gendered term. So if you think the obvious fact that men and woman possess innate differences is offensive then there you go, otherwise it is no more offensive than the term "fairer sex."
As far as these rules go, I have always felt people are missing the obvious parody here. This article is very clearly written in Dragon Magazines parody format, in a very similar vein to how the old Anti-Paladin concept was written up. We know their where female play-testers since at least blackmore, and earlier. With female characters being common even among male players. I other words it is likely they recieved questions about this, and thought they where being cheeky, literally look thru the art in old D&D books, female characters where fairly common. Now look at the art in this article, the character looks like a blow up doll. It is very obviously a joke article, and I don't see how so many people miss this fact.
They did likely intend for people to use this, in the same way they intended for people to use the Anti-Paladin. Which people did actually do, as many tables ripped the comeliness ability score from this and applied it to everyone, in order to help distinguish charisma from your physical appearance.
I appreciate the irony of the illustration by Paul Jaquays, who became Jennel Jaquays, on an article related to gender.
Fun fact: if a fighter has a lower level of strength relative to other fighters, 2-handed swords actually make sense as a weapon of choice. Weapons like swords aren’t nearly as heavy as pop culture makes them out to be, and 2-handed swords are only slightly heavier than their 1-handed counterparts, yet you use both hands to move them around. So a 2-handed sword in most cases is actually lighter per hand. I say this as a petite person who practices historical European fencing.
And people wonder why everyone calls Gygax a sexist
This was not made by Gygax, it was made by Len Lekofka.
it's crazy how the original D&D rulebooks read exactly as if someone reverse engineered the mechanics of a Star Trek TOG episode
I think they know what they were writing, they thought it was funny and didn't consider that this could be discussed by the richest man in the world and 0,1-1% of the world population on the Internet.
I miss the spahgetti monster
Hey, wanted to ask if you'll be making us a RuneQuest character in the future? And possibly by extension a HeroQuest Glorantha character?
While there is a fair amount of cringe in this article so must I say that I consider it more entertaining then not.
Gladiatrix might be proper Latin; I don't know. It was not yet, however, carried into English in the way gladiator was. Hollywood made "gladiator movies" back in the 1950s. The term gladiatrix wasn't used in English until the History Channel aired a documentary by that nane several years ago.
So yes, gladiatrix is cooler, but it would have been unknown or tought to be a typo back in the 1970s.
As a positive thing, even if it's being referenced as a negative one, that gross quote from Gygax at the end reveals that people in (I presume?) the 70s were campaigning for "non-gender" representation in DND already, to the point that the creator was compelled to comment on it.
The exp table showing differences for female characters is wild. I wonder if it was all supposed to work like this - you invite a woman to play D&D with you (difficulty level - impossible), she is rewarded more for each encounter so there's a bigger chance she'll get into it long term and just as she stays in the group permanently, her power level starts dropping so the poor guys stop feeling emasculated and can finally be mechanically better than a girl.
It was just an intent that players should be able to make choices affecting the game mechanics of their characters. Nobody even considered the gender of the players back then, or whether people would want customizing choices that didn't have an effect on game mechanics. The idea that people wanted to be able to select character sex without it having any effect on game mechanics was once considered bizarre, as in "why would anyone do that then" bizarre.
Yeah. These were optional rules. They were not the main set for the system. By default, male and female characters were considered equal in abilities. At least as far back as ad&d 1st edition. I don't have the BD&D or Od&D boxsets anymore, so I can't check those first hand.
I was watching this video cuz I wanted a laugh, and it was quite a good one until that moment with the charm monster spell. YIKES with that one. Got funny again afterwards, though. I usually treat this kinda stuff from the history of our hobby with laughing at it because that's really all there is to do about it and the amount i feel it's worth caring. "They're dead now, who cares", basically. It's also just kinda pathetic to see people go through such efforts just to be sexist and in SUCH a nerdy way. xD Nerdy men have a very particular form of misogyny.
Also that one guy in the comments really just got triggered by this video, huh. Man, what a snowflake. And they say women are the overly emotional ones. Lmao
Women are, get over yourself
OMG YOU ARE USING THE GREENSCREEN I SAID YOU WERENT USING A COUPLE MONTHS BACK
Tarot Reading is basically Augury from modern d&d.
This was an ARTICLE ! This is not official DND rules. The fact that it refers to a female orc thief shows it is clearly someone's home brew rules they shared with the community. So this person made rules for Original DnD that reflect that women are not as strong, more dexterity, and multi-tasking. And that they often use sex appeal to get their way. In other words the rules reflect REALITY! This was in 1979. We didn't bend the knee to deluded feminist that think a woman can beat a man in boxing or football. And distaff was used in an effort to use period medieval language, not as a slur.