Detailed athletics rules, and male vs female muscle, basic speed, performance.

[BraselC5048]

I'm writing up some detailed rules on athletics, and according my rules, which use Basic Speed instead of Basic Move, the best females have Basic Speed 7.75, and males 8.25. The question is whether I should simply assume top level female athletes simply buy up basic speed less then the best males during character creation, and that your characters likely should too, or should I dock females .25 Basic Speed or so in the rules?

I've already got rules that females characters have Very Fit apply to uses of Extra Effort, inspired by this and other similar posts, but should buy a lower ST during character creation in return. Should I take the same character creation based approach?

Originally Posted by Irenaeus

I'm not sure how to simulate the near-immunity to muscle fatigue that some trained women seem to have, but I'm pretty impressed by it. I start out stronger, but I also fade more quickly.

[mr beer]

You're asking if your default "average" human female should start with 4.75 Basic Speed instead of 5.0 Basic Speed? I guess that's possible, I think if you randomly select 100 men and women and then make them run a short foot race, the men will perform slightly better. I don't know whether men Dodge better as well though.

I don't think it matters greatly, as long as everyone gets the same number of points to spend in character design, then players start off equal.

[BraselC5048]

Originally Posted by mr beer

You're asking if your default "average" human female should start with 4.75 Basic Speed instead of 5.0 Basic Speed? I guess that's possible, I think if you randomly select 100 men and women and then make them run a short foot race, the men will perform slightly better. I don't know whether men Dodge better as well though.

I don't think it matters greatly, as long as everyone gets the same number of points to spend in character design, then players start off equal.

No, I'm asking if they should get docked for my personal athletics houserules only, not effecting dodge in the very same game. The other issue is that it would have a bunch of females with Basic Speed 8+ equaling or equaling or even very slightly exceeding exceeding the best men's skills (gymnastics, FYI, so not actually running or swimming faster or the like).

Then again, these girls have quite literately been bred for this, born and raised too, and it's been going on for a few centuries or more. The template they're going for is extremely demanding, and out of every 2000 people born into it, only 3 meet it without something else disqualifying them. That 3 meet it at all is a minor miracle, only a result of being bred for it in the first place, the general public just wouldn't have the stats needed.

These girls are the best of the ones who didn't meet it for some reason, and although meeting the (extreme) DX, HT, Will (more as result of childhood than genetics) and Basic Speed highly bought up requirements, and have very useful advantages (Perfect Balance, for example), they either didn't meet the (extreme) Per or (above average) IQ requirements, were unable to meet standards in a Hard or worse skill, or have a disadvantage disqualifying them (one has Glory Hound, for example, which works perfectly fine here, but not in their intended career, or one of them might be blue-green color blind, I haven't decided), or couldn't sufficiently learn foreign languages.

I guess that background justifies being able to equal the very best male performances (although not exceeding), every case somebody has either been able to do it in training, or easily could have done it had the circumstances been different (trying to land it) and has been tried and almost pulled off. No things that nobody else, male or female, can do. Basically it's a "lets crash the olympics this year, and show them how much better people where we're from can be," (after the ambassador commented "Is that really the best there is here" and caused a minor scandal). They likely won't be coming back, since otherwise the sport would be ruined by one group being so much better than everybody else.

[McAllister]

I believe there's nothing good at the end of this path. I suggest turning back.

[Dwarf99]

Yeah, it's a ****storm waiting to happen.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

No, I'm asking if they should get docked for my personal athletics houserules only, not effecting dodge in the very same game. <snip>

OK, well my view is that as long as a player isn't penalised whether they choose to play a male or female, it shouldn't really matter if you make minor penalties to baseline males and females. So do whatever you think fits your house rules best, is my advice, as long as you don't think your players will object or feel uncomfortable. It's kind of a sticky area, but you know your setting and players better than anyone else here.

[BraselC5048]

Considering the players are simply going to buy basic speed up for 5 points anyway to make up the gap, there's likely not much point to this. After all, I doubt the characters would come out any less than 300 points anyway, 250 at least, 5 points is chump change. At least Overconfidence should get rid of any nerves about the whole thing. It's a 3 girl team, and they actually are doing some negotiation between them on "you can't do that one. I'm want to do that one" when it comes to the actual routines." They're balanced against each other and stat and skill levels, not a point total. I'm of the "pick the stats and skill levels that fit the character concept and let the points fall where they may, within reason" school of thought. A completely different character would up having to to change the level of the Dependent disadvantage to stay within any reasonable limit at all.

[Ashtagon]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

No, I'm asking if they should get docked for my personal athletics houserules only,

Your personal house rules? As long as it doesn't offend any of your players, go wild then. What you're proposing in effect is that all female characters take what amounts to a racial template.

fwiw, RPGs having been moving away from this ever since the early 80s. It's not something I would ever consider implementing in my games for human characters. For an exotic alien race with notable sexual dimorphology, yes. But not for humans.

[Tomsdad]

In game I'd do it by limiting maximums, rather than adjusting base levels. That way you avoid issues of inherent ability (all of them), but keep the ability to adjust difference in upper performance levels.

The reality is while there is a dimorphic variation, it in very limited areas, and only few of them directly correlate to GURPS stats. So I think you better modelling the over difference in upper performance than trying to model the actual differences themselves.

Now I don't know your athletics house rules so can't comment on them, but I'd say that the GURPS RAW athletics rules are abstracted in general terms to a far greater extent than the differences between top level male and female athletes, so aren't really suited to distinguishing them.

There are a couple of exceptions to this, weight lifting being a classic example very specific action where there's significant overall difference.

The male OR heavy weight category clean and jerk is roughly 50% higher than the female heaviest weight category (of course the fact that the men's heaviest weight category is 105kg+ and the women's is 75kg+ probably explains some of that)


but take the marathon records the mens is 2:02:57 womens is 2:15:25 so that 123 minutes vs. 135 minutes or 10% difference

100m = 9.53sec vs. 10.49sec (I forgot just how good FloJo was, that's held for 26 years)! again 10% difference


High jump 2.45m vs. 2.09m 17% difference

Long jump 8.95m vs. 7.52m 19% difference

100m freestyle (long course) 46.91sec vs. 52.07sec again 10%

the difference is event type seems to be more relevant than the difference in gender.


Then you get weird one like Shot and discus were records are roughly equal but the men shott is just under double the weight of the women's and exactly double with discus. Javelin has a greater distance split, but a narrower split in javelin weight (98m vs. 72m and 800gm vs 600gm)

[DouglasCole]

Once you normalize for body mass and the slight difference in body comp the differences tend to get even smaller. I have a nascent post on this in the drawing board, but I think I finally gave it up. The muscle cells themselves aren't male/female. I never found out if testosterone made more cells, or stronger ones (I think more), but by and large, what my brief skim showed is that especially after you deal with the roughly 10% extra body fat due to female physiology and the dimorphism in body mass, the remainder is well below GURPS' resolution, if there's any remainder to be had.