Makes the characters seem more human--people with a more narrativist slant like to identify with their characters at least a little, and I've seen some make more backstories. Even I did little things like name my white mage 'Schweitzerus' and assume he was the 'good' one, and specialized in debuffs, and my red mage 'Raistlina', and had her specialize in attacks. Partly that's because enchantment/charm spells go to white mages in Dragonlance, of course. But when I had three fighters in my early Pool run, I had to come up with some way to tell them apart, so I color-coded them and decided the lawful good guy was the wimpy one who didn't want to be a fighter, the chaotic neutral guy was the tough one who wanted to fight, and the lawful neutral one was the anal one who always wanted the best items.

D&D got heat over the gender differential in 1st ed, and got rid of it in 2nd, probably because it was safer politically than balancing it with some advantage for female characters. I agree it's unrealistic, but then so are wizards and dragons, so if someone wants to fantasize about sword-wielding amazons, go right ahead. Sure a woman is never going to be the strongest person in the world, but then again nobody of either sex is ever going to be able to cast Delayed Blast Fireball.

I also think flamewars over video games are silly. You don't like a game, don't play it. Video games serve no useful purpose and teach no useful skills anyway, they're just a less dangerous vice than alcohol or cocaine. I'm not gonna hate a guy because he likes Jim Beam instead of Jagermeister. ;)

That doesn't mean that the old rules were 'terrible'. They were realistic.

They just decided to make their games a little more unrealistic with the new rules, because they hoped that people would like them better that way. And they were true, most players apparently like their characters to be as powerful as possible and will chose a more powerful one over a less powerful one.

Why have characters in the first place? ;-)

No. The rule is terrible and unrealistic, you're embarrasingly wrong, go lern 2 math.

A maximum strength limit means that boys and girls, squishy wizards and squishy wizardesses, crap-covered farmers and crap-covered milkmaids, dainty noblemen and dainty noblewomen, and slovenly trulls of either gender all have equal average strength! The difference only applies to legendary warriors with the strength of ogres. The rule goes out of its way to completely disregard the realistic range and only shit on your character if you want to play a badass mythical warrior-lady.

Even better, the way percentile strength is rolled for, there are 51 times as many lady warriors with a strength of 18-50 than with 18-49. Carl Gauss, we spit on your grave! Way to go. And don't even get me started on realistic gender differences between male and female elves.

And, of course, players hating the rule and designers getting rid of it to please players and stop punishing them for roleplaying characters with cosmetic traits they prefer is all the proof sane people need to know it was a fucking idiotic rule.

Who forces you to create a wizard with max str? It just means that your badass mythical warrior-lady will be weaker than your badass mythical warrior-gentleman, which is simply realistic. As is the probability of your average sorceress being still a little weaker than your already weak average wizard.

Why is it so difficult to get your head around that?

You're all overthinking this.

They made a game. Female and maximum strength was different. People complained. They changed that.

You are playing very old games. Some were before the change, some after.