D&D 5E (2014) Dragonborn inter-species breeding?

No no no no no no no no no.

Rape is not, nor is it ever part of D&D. It's a part of some tables, maybe, but exactly 0% of D&D has anything to do with anything to do with that. I think several in this thread have already addressed why this is totally off-base.
Well, it was heavily implied in the origins of half-orcs for a long time.

Edit: Forget "heavly implied" it's flat out stated in some cases. E.g. in Races of Faerun (3e) the half-drow description starts with "Since so many drow are irredeemable evil, they only mate with humans by way of rape or slavery"

I don't role play cleaning arse activities even if it's assumed.
And how could you roleplay it with WotC releasing only APs and refusing the give us the much needed "Complete Guide to Defecation". I still don't understand how anyone can claim 5e is even close to being playable with such important rules not even on the horizon
 
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I don't think rape is uniquely bad though--there are LOTS of evil things that you wouldn't want to inflict onscreen. I've been thinking about this lately because on the one hand, if the bad guys don't actually do evil things, why should PCs think it's okay to kill them? And on the other hand, I have no desire whatsoever to befoul my mind with the mentality needed to run monsters and NPCs committing atrocities. It's just not worth it.

If you can avoid exploring the absolute depths of villains, I recommend that you continue to do so. Unfortunately, I have already been there (not just in the tale I recounted, but also in a story that I was writing). Once you touch the heart of the thing, it leaves a stain you can't ever quite wash off, and it taints the way you see people and their motivations.

I haven't resolved the tension (let the PCs find hints and scarred victims but never witness anything? Censor descriptions with bleeps?) but it certainly gives me sympathy for Gygax's alignment system. It may have been invented to solve similar problems. "Yes, the orc's heart is blackest evil, let's not discuss the details. Just kill it already, and the world will be a better place."

You don't need to censor descriptions with bleeps. There is an in-character way to handle it. People who have been through horrible things, particularly when those horrible things happened recently, are generally not inclined to walk through the graphic details of it. A simple pause and an uncomfortable look away speaks just as loudly about what happened as the colored water swirling down the drain in Psycho does about the gory slashing that took place in the shower scene.
 

You don't need to censor descriptions with bleeps. There is an in-character way to handle it. People who have been through horrible things, particularly when those horrible things happened recently, are generally not inclined to walk through the graphic details of it. A simple pause and an uncomfortable look away speaks just as loudly about what happened as the colored water swirling down the drain in Psycho does about the gory slashing that took place in the shower scene.

That's basically what I meant by "find scarred victims but never witness anything." Actually they did find one lady early on who'd been used by neogi to power a lifejammer, and she'd (probably) lost her family and everyone she knew to those same neogi.

That approach is limited, though. BTW, I didn't mean literally censor things by saying "bleep", but more the general idea that "you spend an hour hiding in the rocks observing the orc warcamp, and hearing the sounds of unspeakable cruelty and orcs glorying in pain and degradation on their captives. At the end of that hour you have gathered valuable operational intelligence, and you could gather more, but every instant you spend listening to those cries drives you closer to wracking sorrow or even madness. Do you retreat or take action?" Describe the gist but not the details. I think the gist is important though, to make it emotionally clear that mercy to the orcs is not a mercy to the larger world, and that even well-roleplayed PCs should expeditiously remove them from the Prime Material plane instead of trying to be humane. D&D is a game of solving problems through direct application of violence, and that works best in a dark and gritty world where horrible things happen and someone needs to stop them.

Again, my campaign has lots of BBEGs bouncing around plotting against each other, and I'm still trying to figure out ways to make my PCs realize that all of them are bad, even the ones they are temporarily working with. (E.g. they negotiated with the vampire necromancer, and he ended up offering them an alliance against the 8000-strong hobgoblin army... and he is a very effective ally and will eliminate large portions of the hobgoblin army, unless the Red Dragon ambushes him first. But he will do so by infiltrating the camp, charming hobgoblins and turning them into vampire spawns, so if the PCs let their ally do his thing they will soon find that their kingdom has been overthrown by an insane vampiric warlord with thousands of vampire spawn minions... and I need a way to make it clear that this putative ally of theirs is truly baaaad news, not a morally ambiguous antihero.)
 

I don't think rape is uniquely bad though--there are LOTS of evil things that you wouldn't want to inflict onscreen.

True. However, consider the odds that someone at your table has lost someone to murder, or to various other evil things; compare with the odds that someone at your table has been raped, or knows the story of someone who's been raped. Weigh, accordingly, the odds that a topic raised at your table, may be personally painful for a player.

In my biased opinion, rape can do a lot of indirect emotional damage. The children of someone who was been raped, for example, might never know what happened to their parent, they might never know *why* their parent is hesitant to ever trust or connect with anyone... but the child gets raised with less trust and connection, all the same.

If your table is in the USA, or any other nation with a comparable incidence of rape, take it seriously, please.
 

That approach is limited, though.

It is limited, but only in the sense how graphic the portrayal is. One of the basics of horror (not the gore and jump scares that somehow passes for horror these days) is to use a light touch. In writing, they say "show don't tell." In horror, you want to show, but you only want to show so much.

I often compare it to sexiness. Sure, nudity is sexy. Making the comparison to horror, nudity is the gore dripping monster finally lunging at you to make the kill. However, less is more. If the graphic depiction is theoretically comparable to full nudity, then a little bit of skin here and there is like catching glimpses of the unknown from the corners of your eyes. It creates the buildup that makes the conclusion all the more satisfying.

BTW, I didn't mean literally censor things by saying "bleep", . . .

I know it's funny and a bit silly, but that was actually what I was picturing. I was picturing you, as the DM playing an NPC, telling the PCs what happened. Then, a cell phone slowly rises into view and emits a loud, long beeeeeeeeep that covers up the truly graphic parts.

Maybe that's the part of me that loves a good laugh, but that's literally what popped into my head when you mentioned censoring with bleeps.

. . . but more the general idea that "you spend an hour hiding in the rocks observing the orc warcamp, and hearing the sounds of unspeakable cruelty and orcs glorying in pain and degradation on their captives. At the end of that hour you have gathered valuable operational intelligence, and you could gather more, but every instant you spend listening to those cries drives you closer to wracking sorrow or even madness. Do you retreat or take action?" Describe the gist but not the details. I think the gist is important though, to make it emotionally clear that mercy to the orcs is not a mercy to the larger world, and that even well-roleplayed PCs should expeditiously remove them from the Prime Material plane instead of trying to be humane.

Sure, but as you mentioned, it's about the level of detail. Your quote works just fine, and it has the added benefit of allowing each player who hears it to fill in the gaps with the behaviour they find cruel and denigrating (again, relating back to the horror concept that nothing can ever be as scary as what the watchers/readers imagine, because their thoughts are tailored by their own sub/conscious minds).

It would be quite another thing if you graphically described what was occurring, if you were imitating the grunting sounds that are typically associated with violent thrusting, or if you handed out still pictures from Hostel or some other slasher film that focuses on graphic dismemberment.

D&D is a game of solving problems through direct application of violence, and that works best in a dark and gritty world where horrible things happen and someone needs to stop them.

I agree that D&D can be that. I may even go so far as to say that what you are describing is the typical means of play, but I wouldn't paint it as being as definitive as you have. One of my favorite and most rewarding campaigns focused on courtly intrigue. That campaign had a much heavier focus on skills, social interactions, and non-lethal combat (i.e. dueling) than most other D&D games I've been a part of.

Again, my campaign has lots of BBEGs bouncing around plotting against each other, and I'm still trying to figure out ways to make my PCs realize that all of them are bad, even the ones they are temporarily working with. (E.g. they negotiated with the vampire necromancer, and he ended up offering them an alliance against the 8000-strong hobgoblin army... and he is a very effective ally and will eliminate large portions of the hobgoblin army, unless the Red Dragon ambushes him first. But he will do so by infiltrating the camp, charming hobgoblins and turning them into vampire spawns, so if the PCs let their ally do his thing they will soon find that their kingdom has been overthrown by an insane vampiric warlord with thousands of vampire spawn minions... and I need a way to make it clear that this putative ally of theirs is truly baaaad news, not a morally ambiguous antihero.)

That may be an issue of the players/PCs deluding themselves (sometimes people just don't want to see things), or of the players/PCs being content to let the situation stand as long as the conflict is evil-on-evil.

Regarding the vamp though, there is certainly the question of its longevity. How long-lived is it? If it is old enough, one good way to show the PCs it is bad is to have had a vampire hunter escape with one of the creature's journals many years ago. The creature may consider the journal destroyed or forever lost, but enough of it could still be legible that the PCs can piece together how bad the vamp is from reading about its past plans that it has currently abandoned (or at least put on the shelf for a century or two).
 

True. However, consider the odds that someone at your table has lost someone to murder, or to various other evil things; compare with the odds that someone at your table has been raped, or knows the story of someone who's been raped. Weigh, accordingly, the odds that a topic raised at your table, may be personally painful for a player.

Please recall what I said: "I don't think rape is uniquely bad." The implication is not "I would be casual about rape incidents in my campaign," but "I would be reluctant to bring any number of horrible things into my campaign." In spite of the darkness of the D&D gameworld, I don't want my D&D night to be about bringing darkness into my home. I want hatred and evil to be abstract in my game, not concrete.

I was about to give an example of something that I wouldn't want at my table even if no one at my table has experienced it directly, but you know what? I don't want that kind of stuff in my mind, period. So just pretend I named something really horrific, and let's just both accept that no, we don't want that kind of stuff in the game either. Or at least I don't.

MechaPilot said:
I agree that D&D can be that. I may even go so far as to say that what you are describing is the typical means of play, but I wouldn't paint it as being as definitive as you have. One of my favorite and most rewarding campaigns focused on courtly intrigue. That campaign had a much heavier focus on skills, social interactions, and non-lethal combat (i.e. dueling) than most other D&D games I've been a part of.


While you could run such a game with D&D rules, I would probably prefer to run it under GURPS instead. My generalization about "what D&D is" wasn't intended as normative; I just meant that that is the niche I see D&D as being D&D's forte, at which it excels. Courtly intrigue and social interactions, not so much. 5E doesn't even have Reaction rolls any more, and it's done its best to eliminate all complexity and nuance from the skill list as well. (Plus, d20 systems are just generally bad at skill modelling, compared to bell-curved systems like GURPS.)

Regarding the vamp though, there is certainly the question of its longevity. How long-lived is it? If it is old enough, one good way to show the PCs it is bad is to have had a vampire hunter escape with one of the creature's journals many years ago. The creature may consider the journal destroyed or forever lost, but enough of it could still be legible that the PCs can piece together how bad the vamp is from reading about its past plans that it has currently abandoned (or at least put on the shelf for a century or two).


Well, he predates human (re-)colonization of the planet they're on. He's human, but he's from the original civilization that was there before Witchlight Marauders ate the most of the planet during the first Unhuman War. I think when he goes bad, it's going to be in terms of imposing his civilization's cultural norms and values on modern humans, and punishing them harshly for innocuous crimes like walking on stone. Anyway, he's about a thousand years old.
 
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While you could run such a game with D&D rules, I would probably prefer to run it under GURPS instead. My generalization about "what D&D is" wasn't intended as normative; I just meant that that is the niche I see D&D as being D&D's forte, at which it excels. Courtly intrigue and social interactions, not so much. 5E doesn't even have Reaction rolls any more, and it's done its best to eliminate all complexity and nuance from the skill list as well. (Plus, d20 systems are just generally bad at skill modelling, compared to bell-curved systems like GURPS.)

GURPS is one of those games where I have repeatedly heard the name, but I have no actual exposure to the system. By contrast, I have skimmed the rules for FATAL because I found it hard to believe that a game could ever really be as bad as that one was described as being online. It was that bad (Kudos to you, vast swaths of the internet community. You agreed about something that wasn't a cat video or a conspiracy theory. Good on you).

One of the things that made running my courtly intrigue campaign in a D20 system (it was 4e, actually) work was that I had experienced roleplayers at the table, and I made sure that everyone understood that social skill checks would largely be determined by modifiers arising from actual RP. It also helped that I used the skill challenge system (which has a spotty record among the D&D community, but which I and my players feel that I have been able to use with great success).


Well, he predates human (re-)colonization of the planet they're on. He's human, but he's from the original civilization that was there before Witchlight Marauders ate the most of the planet during the first Unhuman War. I think when he goes bad, it's going to be in terms of imposing his civilization's cultural norms and values on modern humans, and punishing them harshly for innocuous crimes like walking on stone. Anyway, he's about a thousand years old.

Then a journal or something could work. The PCs could even find a tapestry in a forgotten ruin that shows a vampire standing on a hill of corpses, with the vampire BBEG's symbol on an amulet around its neck.
 

Then a journal or something could work. The PCs could even find a tapestry in a forgotten ruin that shows a vampire standing on a hill of corpses, with the vampire BBEG's symbol on an amulet around its neck.

Well, two points:

1.) Finding a journal with a picture of corpses can't possibly have more visceral impact than discovering a whole cavern full of crucified goblins, including goblin children, which Edgewalker (the vampire) casually admits to having... created. (The PCs found the few survivors afterwards, killed one accidentally, but sent the rest to an orphanage of sorts.) He's been pretty arrogant and high-handed to the PCs as well, but not overtly hostile, and less so when he discovered the need for an alliance.

2.) I want him to be evil, but not stereotypically and shallowly so. More like a basically good-ish person twisted by vampirism into madness and extremism.

Anyway, I'll work something out. As mentioned previously, it will probably take the form of a lust for power (he'd been an Ensi before his people died, basically a prince and high priest) and an intolerance of those who don't share his beliefs. Blame it on the vampirism if you like--but my overall goal is for "let Edgewalker kill all the hobgoblins for us" not to be a good strategy in the long-term. I want that cure to be worse than the disease.
 

Finding a journal with a picture of corpses can't possibly have more visceral impact than discovering a whole cavern full of crucified goblins, including goblin children, which Edgewalker (the vampire) casually admits to having... created.

If you've already given a graphic example like that, then the player's/PCs are probably willfully blind so long as the vampire continues to be acting in an evil-on-evil fashion ("the enemy of my enemy. . ." and all that). I find it unlikely that anything short of punting Sarah Mclaughlin puppies through an orphanage window will make them feel the need to change their attitude toward him.
 

Please recall what I said: "I don't think rape is uniquely bad."

True. Which is why the first word of my previous response was "True". I accept your moral assessment. I am aware of other horrible things, and as MechaPilot points out, if you just describe the outlines, then I am likely to fill in the gaps even more effectively than you could, or rather, in a more personalized-for-effectiveness way. I think rape is *particularly prevalent* in American society, which is by no means the same thing as *uniquely bad*... and you could argue that certain other evils are equally prevalent or more prevalent, and you might be right, but by that point we've gone far afield from the question of how a DM responds to the player of a chaotic neutral rogue with that particular Bond.

I have an agenda about compassion for those who have been affected, or harmed directly, by rape. That agenda was relevant to the OP. I think that agenda can co-exist with your larger, broader points about depiction of evil and horror in TRPGs, and the methods which a DM can use to create a compelling story for the players.

I like MechaPilot's idea of the PCs coming across records from long, long ago, such as a journal. Here's a variation: a song of praise, written by some fan of the vamp, long ago. Cognitive dissonance ensues, between how the author of the song presents the vamp's deeds as praiseworthy and awesome, and how the PCs, who judge those deeds by a different set of values, are perhaps awed but not at all in a good way. The song's composer might be someone who was an enemy of the vamp, and then got... converted... and that shift of perspective might be described in the song.

See also, the difficulty Churchill experienced, when it was necessary to either ally with Stalin or risk conquest by Hitler; and Churchill's attempts to end that alliance as expediently as possible, in the endgame of the war.

See also, Xander in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode featuring Dracula.
 

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