Help with newborn child

[Nighthawk1337]

I know this might not be everyone's cup of tea in an RPG, but my character is starting a game with a newborn child she needs to look after.

How much do you think this would annoy other players if I have to always put the child first before adventuring, or do you think it could prove as interesting roleplay.

Character is a very self-sufficient druid that is going to be working with the party to stop the spread of ill-magic in the forest. Child is a half-fey.

 

[Celebrim]

I have only seen this situation occur once. A player's female character became pregnant and she decided after some thought that her character would put the child ahead of her adventuring career. So she retired the PC.

My suggestion is pretty much the same. If you are running a stereotypical D&D adventure game, the decision to put the child first basically is the decision to retire the PC to quasi-NPC status and not part of the central cast of the story. If you are caring first for the safety of your child, you aren't taking the child down into the tomb of horrors or any other adventure location. If you insist in a normal situation to take the child along, not only will it rightly annoy your fellow players, but it will be a logical contradiction.

On the other hand, if you were running a sort of grim and gritty survival apocalypse sort of campaign, and you were playing with a group of thespians, the decision to have your character burdened with a young ward is an interesting RP provoking one. If the adventure is coming to you rather than you going to the adventure, and there is really no way to escape it, nowhere to flee too, then that is part of the story.

 

[Dandu]

I know this might not be everyone's cup of tea in an RPG, but my character is starting a game with a newborn child she needs to look after.

How much do you think this would annoy other players if I have to always put the child first before adventuring, or do you think it could prove as interesting roleplay.

Character is a very self-sufficient druid that is going to be working with the party to stop the spread of ill-magic in the forest. Child is a half-fey.

She can't get a babysitter?

 

[GMMichael]

Can you have an adventure with a newborn? Haven't you seen Willow?

Bringing a baby along is an awesome idea. But you have to hand-wave the mundane stuff, just like for adults. You don't roleplay digging cat-holes or each of your eight hours of sleep - so you shouldn't roleplay the boring baby stuff either.

It's also a really good way to get your companions to second-guess charging in and attacking everything.

 

[Nighthawk1337]

On the other hand, if you were running a sort of grim and gritty survival apocalypse sort of campaign, and you were playing with a group of thespians, the decision to have your character burdened with a young ward is an interesting RP provoking one. If the adventure is coming to you rather than you going to the adventure, and there is really no way to escape it, nowhere to flee too, then that is part of the story.

Yeah that's how this campaign is being run, I think it will a challenge in itself.

She can't get a babysitter?

Not something she would do, in the world we play in if news were to get out she was half-fey some people would stop at nothing to kidnap her.

Can you have an adventure with a newborn? Haven't you seen Willow?


Bringing a baby along is an awesome idea. But you have to hand-wave the mundane stuff, just like for adults. You don't roleplay digging cat-holes or each of your eight hours of sleep - so you shouldn't roleplay the boring baby stuff either.


It's also a really good way to get your companions to second-guess charging in and attacking everything.

I agree maybe when they find out the character has the burden of a child, it might change their attitude to some things.

I guess with the idea you can only try and see if it works, i think it will be fun, but if the others don't like it we'll work something out. I have a decent group I play with.

And I haven't seen Willow, worth watching?

 

[Umbran]

How long is the campaign supposed to take, both in-game time and real-world time?

The iconic example of this - Willow - has two things going for it: The child is plot-relevant, and the time over which the story takes place is limited.

A baby is a baby for a *long* time, in terms of what I think of as the typical adventuring career. So, this issue is at risk of being repetitive, and a burden for which there is no accompanying benefit.

Note, that if you are really putting the baby first, and won't so much as ever have someone watch over the child for you... would you *ever* take part in combat? Aren't you *always* going to flee with the kid? If the kid really comes first, you're never going to actively seek out a fight, for fear of leaving the kid motherless and undefended. This is fine for a sage the party comes to see on occasion, but not so good as an adventuring companion.

I think you'll need to soften that stance - sometimes fighting the wrongs of the world will have to take precedence, if only in the sense that, "The life my child will live in a world overrun by evil will not be worth having."

Other things that can help: The child is itself plot-relevant, a McGuffin that is important to the events in which the adventurers find themselves. And/or, the campaign has a lot of fast-forwards over intervening years, so the kid grows up over the course of the campaign, so that late in the campaign maybe the issue is keeping the kid from following you into battle....

 

[Nighthawk1337]

How long is the campaign supposed to take, both in-game time and real-world time?

The iconic example of this - Willow - has two things going for it: The child is plot-relevant, and the time over which the story takes place is limited.

A baby is a baby for a *long* time, in terms of what I think of as the typical adventuring career. So, this issue is at risk of being repetitive, and a burden for which there is no accompanying benefit.

Note, that if you are really putting the baby first, and won't so much as ever have someone watch over the child for you... would you *ever* take part in combat? Aren't you *always* going to flee with the kid? If the kid really comes first, you're never going to actively seek out a fight, for fear of leaving the kid motherless and undefended. This is fine for a sage the party comes to see on occasion, but not so good as an adventuring companion.

I think you'll need to soften that stance - sometimes fighting the wrongs of the world will have to take precedence, if only in the sense that, "The life my child will live in a world overrun by evil will not be worth having."

Other things that can help: The child is itself plot-relevant, a McGuffin that is important to the events in which the adventurers find themselves. And/or, the campaign has a lot of fast-forwards over intervening years, so the kid grows up over the course of the campaign, so that late in the campaign maybe the issue is keeping the kid from following you into battle....

How long the game goes, both in real and game time, depends entirely on the other players, and how long they want to go. The DM is running a very player-driven game, so where the game goes depends entirely upon us. I'm honestly fine with staying at the back and casting heals on people, maybe picking up things like reach spell so I can stay back from the action, rather than getting into the thick of things.

The baby itself is a half-fey, which in my DM's world grow up quite significantly faster than human children, about twice as fast, and the DM does track things like travel time, so if we move around a lot (which seems like it might be the case), and nobody has teleport (which it doesn't look like will be the case, as the only person capable of getting it will be a sorcerer, so they might not pick it up), then travel time alone might make the game progress at a decent rate. The last game I played with this DM covered about the span of 2 years in game over about a 8 month period out of game, and that was a very confined game with little to no overland travel.

Finally, I have a petal familiar (using the familiar ACF) who could take care of the baby while I'm going on particularly dangerous adventures, hiding the child away in a tree hollow or the like and using the emphatic link to keep in touch and immediately retreat to the baby if the familiar senses something wrong.

 

[Dandu]

Not something she would do, in the world we play in if news were to get out she was half-fey some people would stop at nothing to kidnap her.?

She's a druid. She has an animal companion, right? Can she entrust the baby to the animal companion when she's in a dungeon or something?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I know this might not be everyone's cup of tea in an RPG, but my character is starting a game with a newborn child she needs to look after.

How much do you think this would annoy other players if I have to always put the child first before adventuring, or do you think it could prove as interesting roleplay.

Character is a very self-sufficient druid that is going to be working with the party to stop the spread of ill-magic in the forest. Child is a half-fey.

Taking a baby adventuring is insane. By it's very nature adventures are filled with lethal surprises. That 1 hit point baby could die at any time.

Growing up twice as quickly is still not enough. In 1 year it may have the capabilities of a 2 year old child, which still has no business being anywhere near an adventure.

If I were a PC in the campaign I'd retire on the spot. I wouldn't be party to recklessly endangering a helpless infant.

I had a vaguely similar situation come up in a Warhammer Dark Heresy game. We had an adult psyker (we were all adults, of course) who had summoned demons, presumably by accident, and we ended up tying her up and drugging her unconscious until we got out of warp. The DM made us roll for injecting drugs, and said that marking the veins wouldn't do anything, so we had to make a skill check every time. We had maybe a 30% chance of pulling it off, each time, plus a limited supply of night-night juice. We wasted a good hour of playtime trying to come up with a SOP for keeping the helpless psyker under control. The DM got cranky. This situation, in game time, was maybe a couple of weeks. Later on we were stuck with a severely wounded eldar that we could not kill for diplomatic reasons, and our attempts to hand him over to "safety" kept failing. We used him as a key. (A lot of eldar technology only worked for eldars, such as a door to a fortress we found, so we rubbed the already-wounded eldar over the control panels to open and close the door. None of the bad guys were eldar, I'm happy to say.)

Keeping a baby safe would be far more difficult. You can't (well, shouldn't) drug them unconscious. Then you need to feed them, deal with poor appetites sometimes, know when not to feed them (the baby sticks its tongue out slightly, yes that's real-life knowledge), burp them, deal with their limited resistance to disease, deal with waste products, deal with staying awake all night because the baby is crying and you don't know why (there's no Talk With Baby spell that I've seen), carry around a crib and a stroller or baby-carrier, entertain the baby, teach them to talk, keep them quiet when trying to be stealthy, keep them from throwing up, come up with something that will protect them from random area of effect spells, prevent them from getting kidnapped, prevent them from getting lost, prevent them from getting injured in accidents, prevent them from getting eaten by fast-moving predators, prevent them from having the life sapped out of them when you accidentally walk into the Shadowfell (that happened to me in my last game session, and we lost 0-2 healing surges each based on skill checks... babies probably can't make skill checks; I did mention that adventuring is filled with unpredictable lethal effects, unless the DM puts the game on "easy mode" to keep the child alive...), there's just so many things wrong with that scenario. It's the ultimate in bad escort mission design.

 

[Umbran]

I'm honestly fine with staying at the back and casting heals on people, maybe picking up things like reach spell so I can stay back from the action, rather than getting into the thick of things.

What usually happens to the spellcasters who stand in the back? They attract ranged attacks and areas of effect. If your character is near enough to do things in combat, then the combat is near enough to do things to you, and the baby.