Situation: I want a female human fighter with 18/00 strength. Since the sexist game designers decided not to allow it, I have two options to hack one in. Which is the better choice?

1. Create the character as male, modify the character's strength to 18/00, and then hack the character to female.

2. Create the character as female, and then hack the character's strength to 18/00.

It is harder to hack gender, as it will make hard to choose proper gender-specific portrait (if game features portraits)...

So hacking stats is better....

3. Get some professional help. You obviously have some issues to deal with.

Depends on the game. I know in Pool of Radiance there is absolutely no restrictions on portrait or icon selection. So you can make a "male" character, roll 18/00 strength, or just modify it, and then just give them a female portrait and icon. I don't think the game responds to gender at all anyways, so unless seeing a tiny little "M" on the character screen bothers you that much, that seems like the way to go.

You got too much free time, buddy

Hack gender, it's one lousy byte and almost nothing checks for it.

I remember Jaesun used this to get a gay romance in Treasures of the Savage Frontier.

Out of curiosity, what happens if you set it to something other than male or female? (A byte has 256 possible values.) What are the strength caps for other gender characters?

I actually thought of two other methods which are more difficult, but need only be done once per game.

3. Figure out where the stat caps are stored in the executable and edit them to raise the female stat caps to match the male one.

4. Figure out where the game checks the character's gender at character creation and modification and replace the branch with a conditional jump or with NOP instructions. (This one might have issues with the EULA, though I have not checked.)

Better yet: 5. Create the character as male, modify the character's strength to 18/00, and claim he is female because gender is a social construct.

Yes, but then everyone in-game will treat the character as male.

As a side note, I think method 4 might be the most fun, even if it is the most challenging method and the one that might violate the EULA. Building a heavy debug version of DOSBox is the first step. Maybe I'll try doing this for Unlimited Adventures so that hacked designs can use the tweak.

Pool of Radiance has no responses to gender at all. You care about it more than anybody in the game does.

In this thread: idiots busting their asses defending a terrible rule officially acknowledged to be terrible 24 years ago.

----- It's actually not possible to have a bona fide gay romance in a game which doesn't allow them without hacking where the game checks for gender on a fundamental level -- what Jaesun did was (probably) temporarily change the value in the save file or in memory. So if you do make a hack, please share.

I think he said that's what he did--he created the character as female, then hacked it to male. But of course at that point the relationship with Jabarkas had been established.

Strange how this topic isn't event mentioned it the link you provided. Much less labeled a 'terrible rule'.

It's a game based on the same IP and published by the same company which doesn't have gender-based strength limits. You posted in EotB-related threads information suggesting you're familiar with the games, so you can't use ignorance to claim legitimacy for your bout of retrobutthurt.

Why have genders in the game in the first place?