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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 6589032" data-attributes="member: 6786839">Well... yes and no. In a D&D *setting*, sure, rape happens, just as plague happens, along with brutal taxation, illiteracy, famine and so forth; at least among the human civilizations which are modelled on Middle Ages life. Rape is present in the setting of every story in a realistic contemporary genre. It's also present in "Star Trek"; Lt. Tasha Yar refers to rape gangs on her (violent, backwards) home planet. And although all the posts in this thread, so far, have taken a stance on rape as an unacceptable, evil action, that's not exactly consensus in larger society.On another hand, none of those horrible realities necessarily appears in gameplay. If Lord of the Rings had been a D&D campaign, it could have been a fine one, though I hope the players would have more awareness of how much of the setting is "swept under the rug"; for every named character who appears in Gondor or Rohan, there are presumably scores of subsistence-lifestyle peasants, whose taxes pay for those named NPCs to have swords and so forth. Anyways, all of the famine, flogging of serfs, rape, etc. happens away from the "main stage" action.A D&D setting is necessarily different from European history, and might be better in some places. Elves could have a fundamentally better civilization than humans, with rare-to-zero theft, murder or rape. Humans with divine magic - even if it's rare - might have a much better average life than the humans of Earth in 1100 or 1200 AD. After all, if a city is lucky enough to get help from *one* level 5 druid, that druid can *double the harvest* on all the surrounding fields; a cleric who can cure disease twice per day could, I think, do a lot to slow down the spread of a plague. The presence of a few paladins could dramatically change a city's criminal justice system. And so forth.Anyways... taking it out on the *character* is not, IMO, the answer. Because that just tells the player, that immediate negative consequences of rape happen *in a fictional fantasy setting*. I think there's more value in giving the player the news that unlike certain (not all) football teams, and certain (not all) college fraternies, and certain (not all) armies of occupation, your D&D group has a set of morals, *as real people in the real world*, which does not accept rape.</blockquote>

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