Author Topic: Pregnant characters  (Read 2779 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

archangel.arcanis

  • Organ Grinder
  • *****
  • Posts: 2938
    • Email
Pregnant characters
« on: June 24, 2009, 11:56:54 AM »
Inspired by a question from MilwaukeeJoe. How does you group deal with pregnancy in game?

Some typical ways to deal with it though there will be others i'm sure:
a) Sex doesn't happen in our games because we are there to kill stuff.
b) We just say your character got laid and leave it at that.
c) Every time we are rolling some sort of check to see if pregnancy occurs.

Obviously this only really applies if you let pregnancy of a PC or NPC occur in game. As a DM i have used this to great effect to show my characters that there are consequences to their actions without throwing them in jail. After one character received a string of letters from every town they had been to in the past few months the whole party decided  trying to have sex with every wench and barmaid in sight was a bad idea.

How about female pcs? I have personally played 2 females that got pregnant in game. One retired from adventuring life shortly after realizing that she was pregnant. The other had only just realized it before getting killed. The one who retired stayed active in the game as her home became a base of operations for the group and they did some tasks to help her out, her husband was a minor noble and there were rival nobles trying to kill the baby that was a bad idea on their part.

Clerics and Druids are like the 4 and 2 in 42. Together they are the answer to the ultimate question in D&D.
Retire the character before the DM smacks you with the Table as the book will feel totally inadequate now.-Hazren

RobbyPants

  • Organ Grinder
  • *****
  • Posts: 7139
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #1 on: June 24, 2009, 01:01:02 PM »
Inspired by a question from MilwaukeeJoe. How does you group deal with pregnancy in game?

Some typical ways to deal with it though there will be others i'm sure:
a) Sex doesn't happen in our games because we are there to kill stuff.
b) We just say your character got laid and leave it at that.
c) Every time we are rolling some sort of check to see if pregnancy occurs.
In general, I tend to use option B whenever it comes up.

In one game, I do remember deciding to use C just for the hell of it, and as luck would have it, the PC got pregnant in her first encounter.  It never really mattered in game play, as the entire campaign was finished in a fairly short period of time, so she might not have even been showing at that point.  Still, the players would always tease her for going out adventuring while pregnant.  Luckily, with that particular group, it worked fairly well and didn't hurt the game.

There was another game with the same female player who was running a male PC (rare for her).  I don't remember the specifics, but I do remember her getting her NPC girlfriend pregnant.  I thought it was planned, but I could be wrong (this was four or five years ago).  I do remember us having time pass by for about two years, and her PC resumed adventuring.  That was also a pretty fun campaign.  The other two male players had their PCs be sort of "uncles" to the kid.  The odd twist was that all three of the PCs were evil, and the NPC mother was a chaotic neutral tiefling (which also made the child a tiefling).  Much hilarity insued.

« Last Edit: June 24, 2009, 01:03:55 PM by RobbyPants »
My balancing 3.5 compendium
Elemental mage test game

Quotes
[spoiler]
Quote from: Cafiend
It is a shame stupidity isn't painful.
Quote from: StormKnight
Totally true.  Historians believe that most past civilizations would have endured for centuries longer if they had successfully determined Batman's alignment.
Quote from: Grand Theft Otto
Why are so many posts on the board the equivalent of " Dear Dr. Crotch, I keep punching myself in the crotch, and my groin hurts... what should I do? How can I make my groin stop hurting?"
Quote from: CryoSilver
I suggest carving "Don't be a dick" into him with a knife.  A dull, rusty knife.  A dull, rusty, bent, flaming knife.
Quote from: Seerow
Fluffy: It's over Steve! I've got the high ground!
Steve: You underestimate my power!
Fluffy: Don't try it, Steve!
Steve: *charges*
Fluffy: *three critical strikes*
Steve: ****
Quote from: claypigeons
I don't even stat out commoners. Commoner = corpse that just isn't a zombie. Yet.
Quote from: CryoSilver
When I think "Old Testament Boots of Peace" I think of a paladin curb-stomping an orc and screaming "Your death brings peace to this land!"
Quote from: Orville_Oaksong
Buy a small country. Or Pelor. Both are good investments.
[/spoiler]

veekie

  • Organ Grinder
  • *****
  • Posts: 9034
  • WARNING: Homing Miko
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2009, 01:22:13 PM »
Generally A or B, C has just too much opportunity to do all kinds of weird shit to a game, unless it's engineered as part of plot anyway.
The mind transcends the body.
It's also a little cold because of that.
Please get it a blanket.

I wish I could read your mind,
I can barely read mine.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

[spoiler]
"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
-Ibuki Suika, on overkill

To sumbolaion diakoneto moi, basilisk ouranionon.
Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
Khiliarkhou Astrape!
[/spoiler]

There is no higher price than 'free'.

"I won't die. I've been ordered not to die."

Prime32

  • Administrator
  • Organ Grinder
  • *
  • Posts: 7534
  • Modding since 03/12/10
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2009, 01:29:20 PM »
I just had to mention two possible sources of hilarity:

A changeling who inadvertently becomes pregant can only take female forms. If (s)he got drunk, (s)he may not even know what race the father is.  :p

Unholy scions. Just unholy scions. Demon-touched foetuses with spellcasting abilities who mindcontrol their mothers.
My work
The tier system in a nutshell:
[spoiler]Tier 6: A cartographer.
Tier 5: An expert cartographer or a decent marksman.
Tier 4: An expert marksman.
Tier 3: An expert marksman, cartographer and chef who can tie strong knots and is trained in hostage negotiation or a marksman so good he can shoot down every bullet fired by a minigun while armed with a rusted single-shot pistol that veers to the left.
Tier 2: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything, or the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.
Tier 1: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything and the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.[/spoiler]

MilwaukeeJoe

  • Barbary Macaque at the Rock of Gibraltar
  • ***
  • Posts: 154
    • Rappan Athuk Play-By-Email
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #4 on: June 24, 2009, 02:10:37 PM »
The topic of preganancy worked well in a play-by-email game I was in. My character was the father, and the mother was nearly to term (but still adventuring, it was fantasy!)

Both of our characters were killed in an encounter with a demon... but the rest of the party killed the demon afterward. One raise dead scroll.... they chose to use it on the mother in hopes to save the child.

And it did. Made for some good roleplay.

MilwaukeeJoe

PaladinRevenant

  • Ring-Tailed Lemur
  • **
  • Posts: 23
  • A casual gamer who wants to spread the love
    • Paladin Revenant's MySpace page
    • Email
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #5 on: June 24, 2009, 02:40:47 PM »
Generally option B is how things go in our games unless there is a reason for the pregnancy.  In a current Mage: The Ascension game that I'm playing in, there is a member of the Celestial Chorus who worships Lilith.  During the course of the game she became pregnant with the daughter of Lilith/Lilith herself.  From what I understand, external factors are going to induce labor in the next game.

I think that if I were running a game in which the PCs were based in one place or returned to the same place regularly, I might be inclined to do something like option C, but our parties tend to be rather transient.

dither

  • Hong Kong
  • ****
  • Posts: 1413
  • Breaking the ninth wall
Re: Pregnant characters
« Reply #6 on: June 24, 2009, 03:33:38 PM »
I tend to go with option B most of the time. I only bother with pregnancy when it works for rule of drama. I almost never roll for it. If a PC wants to get pregnant, it's a go (unless either the mother or father is an arcane spellcaster, or either one is evil, then I might muck around with it some). If a PC wants to get an NPC pregnant, it's a go, unless it works out for rule of funny.
"Stuck between a rogue and a bard place."

vanity
Read my webcomic!
Dither's Amazing Changing Avatars

[spoiler]
Quote from: Shadowhunter
Quote from: Flay Crimsonwind
"Vegeta! What does the scouter say about Dither's power level?"
It's over nine thousand!

Quote from: Bauglir
Quote from: Anklebite
Quote from: dither
Well blow me down! :P
A SECTION OF THE CAVERN HAS COLLAPSED!
dither, Miner, has died after colliding with an obstacle!
[/spoiler]