How do you handle Pregnancy in your game?

[Kahuna Burger]

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that Xena isn't the best show to watch for hints on what reality is like!

Once you're done working bathroom breaks and hayfever into your game rules you can worry about reality in pregnancy. Until then, Xena is a good show to watch for hints on what an enjoyable fantasy is like.

Kahuna Burger

 

[takyris]

My reading of this thread was interrupted by a call from my extremely pregnant wife, who just informed me that she'd emptied out both bedrooms and the storage closet, which had been full of a waist-high, person-long stack of boxes, loaded them into her truck, and was in the process of taking them to our new place.

So unless your character concept is "person who gets her magical power by punching herself in the stomach over and over again", your fantasy pregnancy should probably be as painless as you'd like it to be, aside from flavor-text about a strange craving for picked shrieker or a tendency to get weepy every time you use Great Cleave.

 

[just__al]

In my campaign you can take maidenwort. It's easily obtained from an herbalist (DC10) or concocted by an alchemist (DC15). Taking it after an indescretion eliminates the chance of pregnancy.

Because of this, never has a PC gotten pregnant, not the sorceror who was determined to sleep with every bard she met nor the rogue who very nearly cost the party's paladin his paladinhood.

 

[drothgery]

My reading of this thread was interrupted by a call from my extremely pregnant wife, who just informed me that she'd emptied out both bedrooms and the storage closet, which had been full of a waist-high, person-long stack of boxes, loaded them into her truck, and was in the process of taking them to our new place.

So unless your character concept is "person who gets her magical power by punching herself in the stomach over and over again", your fantasy pregnancy should probably be as painless as you'd like it to be, aside from flavor-text about a strange craving for picked shrieker or a tendency to get weepy every time you use Great Cleave.

It's not really a matter of "can a pregnant woman be physically active" question, IMO. It's a "will a reasonable expecting mother delibrately walk into potentially lethal situations" question. Sure, there are situations where the answer to that is "yes" (the BBEG wants the pregnant character or her child dead and is employing assassins to accomplish this; the pregnant character's martial or magical abilities are absolutely essential to the defense of her homeland; etc.), but usually the answer is "no".

 

[Squire James]

In a game-mechanics sense, I'd perhaps come up with a list of symptoms at various points during the pregnancy, and a Fortitude DC for each one (average around 15). A level 10 fighter with an 18 Con and a +3 Cloak of Resistance probably doesn't have to worry about anything until T-zero. A mother closer to what we think of as an average human would have something like a typical expectant mothers' problems.

Since the HP system is abstract, I'd assume no harm to the baby unless the mother's reduced to negative HP. At that point I'd probably assess a 10% chance of miscarriage per negative HP. It'd be pretty important to keep the HP tank full if possible!

Pregnancy is only half the story. What happens after the child is born?

 

[Kahuna Burger]

It's not really a matter of "can a pregnant woman be physically active" question, IMO. It's a "will a reasonable expecting mother delibrately walk into potentially lethal situations" question. Sure, there are situations where the answer to that is "yes" (the BBEG wants the pregnant character or her child dead and is employing assassins to accomplish this; the pregnant character's martial or magical abilities are absolutely essential to the defense of her homeland; etc.), but usually the answer is "no".

first don't we have to ask the question "Will any reasonable person deliberately walk into potentially lethal situations?" And since the answer to that is usually "no", we have to assume that adventurers in general are not reasonable.

There seems to be an underlying assumption in some of these responses that a pregnant woman generaly would and universally should ("a reasonable expecting mother") value her preganacy more than her own life, and certainly more than any but the direst of reasons a character would have become an adventurer to begin with. While I think this is interesting, I fear any deep exploration of it would rapidly take us into mod-unfriendly territory. I will say that while IRL I am an expectant mother making accomadations in my mundane life for my pregnancy, I cannot think of a single one of my female characters who, upon 'finding' herself pregnant, would consider that condition worth changing her entire life for and giving up the work she was doing. Where you assume needing extreme circumstances to continue adventuring, my default assumption would be to need a really good reason not to (a child of prophecy, a need to propagate a dying race, some other serious 'plot' repercussion). But generally my characters are "adventuring" as part of who they are and what their entire life is about (voluntarily or not) not as a hobby.

Kahuna Burger