Pregnancy and newborns...

[Son of the Serpent]

not a very long list seeing as you only need to make any of these adjustments twice. Once when they come into play and once when they stop being relevant.

Its also not at all commonly implemented because across all campaigning parties in my circle of rp'rs pc's being pregnant has happened a handful of times in a couple decades.

Ive said this before but ill just restate it here. This thread has made me decide ill probably intentionally play a pregnant pc sometime in the near future. Mostly because the challenge will be fun but also because it would be fun to figure creative ways to turn an advantage all the while working against the disadvantages.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

As templates that massively change a lving being go this one is actually pretty simple.

Oh. Yeah, its a template btw.

 

[Eltab]

It's pretty obvious that pregnancy has minimal effect until late in the process (for example, you can literally be the best tennis player in the world at 20 weeks in)

An adventurer woman might be in the best physical condition possible and so have the minimum difficulties with a pregnancy.

But in a realistic simulation you also get those women who have a difficult pregnancy. Bed Rest from 5 months is a big gap in your adventuring career.

 

[Slit518]

Hi, my playgroup got new situation. One our party member is pregnant... So my question is - how usual is it in yours play, how did you deal with it.

we are playing DnD 5, and She is Wild Sorcerer, so she can't cast, because mutating is in game... especially in crit fails.

In 20 years of playing the game, we have had this situation happen once. It was with my first group, a character got the pixie pregnant. Unfortunately, I do not remember how we handled it at the time.

 

[John Dallman]

Nearly all the D&D-family games I've played have been ones where players can have many PCs, and they can move between different DM's worlds. With that kind of structure, a PC taking time off to be pregnant isn't a problem. So quite a few PCs and NPC wives have had children, some of whom have grown up and become adventurers in their own right.

The most notable case was a plotline that one of the players had devised for her character, where bearing a child conceived in a particular place of power with the right father would be important. Arranging that was a scenario in its own right, although the parents got privacy and lack of details for the conception. The mother did some adventuring for the first 3-4 months of the pregnancy, then stayed home until she'd recovered. She was a reasonably significant noblewoman, so childcare was not a problem.

At the other end of the scale, a healer character of mine has been asked if he could terminate a pregnancy. Since the NPC in question had been rescued from the dungeons of an extremely evil temple, where she'd been subjected to the attentions of incubi, this seemed entirely reasonable.

 

[the Jester]

Side note on something that was said that has always been outlandish but was long supported due to horribly flawed research methodology has been corrected and the correction corroborated:
Women actually have a lower pain threshold and lower pain tolerance. Furthermore when experiencing the same pain causing injury women lose the ability to fight through it way faster. Also child birth isnt that bad. There are far more painful things a human can endure. Men deal with every single one of them better.

Cite, please.

 

[the Jester]

That said realstically it is absolutely mostly a handicap. As it should be. A big one. Bigger than missing a hand in most scenarios.

You do realize that people have survived pregnancies before we had civilization, right? And sometimes on their own- forced to provide for theirselves and their unborn child, gathering and maybe even hunting? That surviving without a roof over your head is difficult, yet pregnant women have done so for literally hundreds of thousands of years? Sure, many probably had a support network including non-pregnant humans, yet not all of them did. And yet, they still made it- still survived, still managed to feed themselves and their kid, and possibly other children as well.

Your list of penalties is extremely unrealistic except for maybe during labor. Sure, perhaps pregnant women can't keep up as well as they can when unhindered by a child. But the level of penalty your group(s) put on them is just ridiculous.

But, you know, if it works for your group, have fun with it.

 

[aramis erak]

In response to the OP...
Only been a relevant issue in 1 Traveller campaign,
Bu it's been relevant in every pendragon campaign with female PC's I've ever run, and a background in every campaign, female PC's or not.

 

[dragoner]

In sci-fi, it's easy, because everyone is a born from a bag:

BBC Radio 4 - Stranger Than Sci-Fi, Babies In Bags

Physicist Dr Jen Gupta and comedian Alice Fraser travel the worlds of science and sci-fi.

www.bbc.co.uk

I was watching Amanpour and she had on a doctor who said that in a hundred years, we won't even consider natural childbirth once the technique is perfected.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

An adventurer woman might be in the best physical condition possible and so have the minimum difficulties with a pregnancy.

But in a realistic simulation you also get those women who have a difficult pregnancy. Bed Rest from 5 months is a big gap in your adventuring career.

In a D&D campaign, the adventurer would realistically have ready access to a 1st level cure wounds spell, able to give back enough HP to bring back someone from near-death to full-health in the span of six seconds. The 2nd level "lesser restoration" should take care of any disease causing the difficult pregnancy.

The "born from a bag" makes me think that in a magic-rich world where you can design spells, there would be, for queens and adventuresses, Leomund's Remote Womb:

Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: A foetus within 10 feet
Components: V, S, M (a small doll)
Duration: up to 9 months

You touch the tummy of an expectant mother. a creature up to Large size. A safe extradimensional shelter is created to acccomodate the child-to-be. This extradimensional space that lasts until the spell ends.

The extradimensional space cannot be reached by common means. The space can hold as many as eight foetuses, provided they come from the same womb.

Attacks and spells can’t cross through the entrance into or out of the extradimensional space.

Anything inside the extradimensional space is properly and safely reattached to the mother when the spell ends.

The spell can be interrupted either at delivery or at the expectant mother's decision (using a bonus action) (so she can feel connected to the children during downtime).