That would also be a good title for a show on TLC
Pregnancy and newborns...
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That would also be a good title for a show on TLC
Li Shenron
Legend
Never seen it happen.
If a player ever brought up the idea in one of my games, I would allow it but I would also downplay it. I would not impose penalties of any sort and I would not use it as a narrative device to threaten the PCs, meaning that I would ignore the possibility that something bad happens to it or because of it. I know quite many people who lost a pregnancy IRL and the mere idea that this risk can be used by a DM to contribute to the game "fun" is utterly disgusting to me.
In fact, in general I also don't threaten the PCs families in the story unless it's the player who suggests it, apart from the fact that I don't normally even tell the players to specify their PCs family ties.
If a player ever brought up the idea in one of my games, I would allow it but I would also downplay it. I would not impose penalties of any sort and I would not use it as a narrative device to threaten the PCs, meaning that I would ignore the possibility that something bad happens to it or because of it. I know quite many people who lost a pregnancy IRL and the mere idea that this risk can be used by a DM to contribute to the game "fun" is utterly disgusting to me.
In fact, in general I also don't threaten the PCs families in the story unless it's the player who suggests it, apart from the fact that I don't normally even tell the players to specify their PCs family ties.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
In our games the PCs are free to get their consensual sexy on as much as they like; and at least one major PC getting pregnant (in all cases another PC was the father) has happened in every campaign I've run.
As such, I've long since had to come up with some rules and rulings around such, particularly when the pregnant PC continues adventuring deep into the pregnancy - which has thus far been the norm - before taking some time off.
These rules and ruling cover everything from chance of pregnancy* to odds of surviving childbirth to what potentially happens to the fetus if any of various bad things should happen to the mother e.g. poison, disease, death-revival, and so on. With the most recent one I also had to rule on how things worked regarding wildshape, as the PC was a Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid).
Possession is the fun one: if an expectant mother gets possessed by a demon or somesuch, there's a small chance that it's the fetus that gets possessed instead - much to the annoyance of the possessor!
* - including between races; along with a huge chart of what can successfully breed with what.
I've never had a PC adventure during the end stages of pregnancy (they tend to pack it in around the 6th month or equivalent) but were one to try it there would be some penalties to movement speed, full-body dexterity (e.g. dodging, climbing etc.; as opposed to picking a lock), and probably encumbrance as well. There'd be some minor benefits also, including a save bonus against anything con-related.
The strangest one I had to deal with came in my current campaign: a pregnant PC got hit with a gender change effect. Yikes! What I ruled was that the pregnancy overrode the gender change until birth, on which it took effect almost immediately: so much for nursing... (the player knew this was coming)
Childbirth tends to lead to the mother (and sometimes the father as well) more or less retiring from adventuring, but not always. And should a PC not want to become or remain pregnant, herbs and so forth exist in the game world to prevent or terminate such.
As such, I've long since had to come up with some rules and rulings around such, particularly when the pregnant PC continues adventuring deep into the pregnancy - which has thus far been the norm - before taking some time off.
These rules and ruling cover everything from chance of pregnancy* to odds of surviving childbirth to what potentially happens to the fetus if any of various bad things should happen to the mother e.g. poison, disease, death-revival, and so on. With the most recent one I also had to rule on how things worked regarding wildshape, as the PC was a Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid).
Possession is the fun one: if an expectant mother gets possessed by a demon or somesuch, there's a small chance that it's the fetus that gets possessed instead - much to the annoyance of the possessor!
* - including between races; along with a huge chart of what can successfully breed with what.
I've never had a PC adventure during the end stages of pregnancy (they tend to pack it in around the 6th month or equivalent) but were one to try it there would be some penalties to movement speed, full-body dexterity (e.g. dodging, climbing etc.; as opposed to picking a lock), and probably encumbrance as well. There'd be some minor benefits also, including a save bonus against anything con-related.
The strangest one I had to deal with came in my current campaign: a pregnant PC got hit with a gender change effect. Yikes! What I ruled was that the pregnancy overrode the gender change until birth, on which it took effect almost immediately: so much for nursing... (the player knew this was coming)
Childbirth tends to lead to the mother (and sometimes the father as well) more or less retiring from adventuring, but not always. And should a PC not want to become or remain pregnant, herbs and so forth exist in the game world to prevent or terminate such.
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
I've had this happen before in a game I ran (I was the GM) and the player brought it up. A number of factors made it, ah, interesting.
1: She had recently given birth herself (less than a year ago)
2: She decided she wanted to do it because she thought I roleplayed an interesting and suitable mate (this was not my intention)
3: Her PC and the NPC were slugmen which have wildly different biology and social mores about pregnancy than humans. (if someone really cares, I have entire blog entries on that topic). In brief, slugmen are hermaphrodites (so both parties would give birth) who lay eggs and they are a magical race - their offprings are mere slugs, which must then receive secret magical treatments during the egg phase to become slugmen. Also, they form the upper caste of yoon-suin society, so only approved of pairings are transformed into slugmen, otherwise the eggs are destroyed. The NPC was an exile (but otherwise a suitable match) so this made things complicated.
Because her PC was going on a long quest, it was decided that the NPC would hatch the eggs and have them to the PC's noble house to be treated to become slugmen, while the PC would go on their quest (the hunt for Kwalish).
1: She had recently given birth herself (less than a year ago)
2: She decided she wanted to do it because she thought I roleplayed an interesting and suitable mate (this was not my intention)
3: Her PC and the NPC were slugmen which have wildly different biology and social mores about pregnancy than humans. (if someone really cares, I have entire blog entries on that topic). In brief, slugmen are hermaphrodites (so both parties would give birth) who lay eggs and they are a magical race - their offprings are mere slugs, which must then receive secret magical treatments during the egg phase to become slugmen. Also, they form the upper caste of yoon-suin society, so only approved of pairings are transformed into slugmen, otherwise the eggs are destroyed. The NPC was an exile (but otherwise a suitable match) so this made things complicated.
Because her PC was going on a long quest, it was decided that the NPC would hatch the eggs and have them to the PC's noble house to be treated to become slugmen, while the PC would go on their quest (the hunt for Kwalish).
Blue
Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal
Just to expand out to what I said earlier. That game would do 8-12 hour sessions back when we were in HS/college, and we could spend 5 hours doing nothing my RP with each other without batting any eye. The DM had a DMPC, something I am normally quite against, simply so they weren't bored when we were doing that.
Not that we didn't do all the normal adventure things, including lots of dungeon crawls because, hey, it's AD&D 2nd and that's what you did. But we got high level* and also got involved in politics and the like.
(*High level = Over 9th. When it takes a six months of weekly 10+ hour sessions to level, that's a big deal. Though the earliest characters did get to epic (over 20).)
We played in FR, and back then you needed an Adventuring Company charter to legally adventure - something far to costly for 1st level adventurers. So we'd sponsor starting adventuring companies, give them a few minor and +1 items (AD&D 2nd and randomly rolled treasure = lots of spare low level items) and send them on their way ... which we played. And when they proved themselves, they were accepting in the main company. The reality behind it was also that we had different groups we could play depending on which players could make it. "We're down Ed, let's play group X that doesn't have him." Some high level characters also took apprentices - which would often be characters of other players. So we always had lots of characters of varying levels and amounts of interaction with each other.
Over the course of the campaign, it was either just guys or with a token girl, but we'd play (98% tastefully) various genders and to a lesser degree orientation. (This was the 80s and early 90s - things weren't as open as they are today.) One player could only do women as ice queen or promiscuous, we were all teens and cut him some slack but I don't think his female characters ever got wooed.
There was definitely a soap opera-esqe feel to intra-party dynamic - who was wooing who, which characters were rivals, and the like. Marriages between PCs and between PCs & NPCs were not uncommon, especially as in-game years passed. We had a paladin almost needing atonement for accepting the marriage proposal of cleric of a different but allied god who was CG (this was back with LG-only paladins).
Pregnancy was one among many downtime activities to rotate the highest level characters out of active play. Not in a Machiavellian way, but we were already voluntarily having them build strongholds, teach at a bardic college, and other things that would take them out of play, so when characters started getting pregnant it just went along with those already established activities.
GrahamWills
Hero
As I stated, my default preference would be that will not occur. Every group has things that, although logical for the world, are just not going to appear. Most groups do not allow harm to children to be a feature of their games, and this would be natural extension.
Now if you are playing DramaSystem or Grey Ranks, it's potentially more appropriate. But in D&D? Put it in the same bin as all the other nasty realistic things that can happen to women in middle-ages societies. Only play those situations if you are very sure of your group and have their enthusiastic buy-in.
Son of the Serpent
Pupil
I definitely get this. Not everyone wants to see the same things in their games. Dead babies are only the spice of life if you want realistic hardship. Realistic hardship is not something i would push as "fun for most". Id even recommend against 99% of groups doing the dead baby thing. Our group does it. Not all should.
GrahamWills
Hero
I believe we are discussing D&D, but I believe most modern systems state that there is no rules-based difference between men and women. This is obviously not an accurate simulation, but is there because it makes the game more enjoyable and inclusive.
So if you are arguing that the simulationist aspect is so important that you must assign penalties to being pregnant, you're on a very shaky basis. The game designers have been pretty clear that differences between genders are a bad idea, so think twice about taking a known bad idea and making it more extreme.
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), and even within a few weeks of birth you'd need to be running a percentage system to be able to simulate the slight drop in effectiveness -- a d20 system can't easily handle those minor differences. So why bother producing an overly-penalizing model of maybe 6 weeks in the life of one character? Even for die-hard simulationists who have a group happy to have realistic gender and age penalties, it's a pretty pointless exercise.
So, if it's against the game design, hard to implement accurately, and applies to a tiny slice of time only ... it seems an excellent candidate to ignore.
So if you are arguing that the simulationist aspect is so important that you must assign penalties to being pregnant, you're on a very shaky basis. The game designers have been pretty clear that differences between genders are a bad idea, so think twice about taking a known bad idea and making it more extreme.
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), and even within a few weeks of birth you'd need to be running a percentage system to be able to simulate the slight drop in effectiveness -- a d20 system can't easily handle those minor differences. So why bother producing an overly-penalizing model of maybe 6 weeks in the life of one character? Even for die-hard simulationists who have a group happy to have realistic gender and age penalties, it's a pretty pointless exercise.
So, if it's against the game design, hard to implement accurately, and applies to a tiny slice of time only ... it seems an excellent candidate to ignore.
Son of the Serpent
Pupil
It was specified a long time back so it would be understandable if you didnt know, but my group basically throws the "everyone is the same and equal" thing right into the incinerator. We know its not in the rules but we wrote rules to account for the differences. And we follow those rules as if tsr or wotc had written them. We dont really care about inclusivity. We know why its not present in the rules. We just play that way and its fine if not everyone does. So long as they dont force their politics on others. Its more fun for some people.
Plus the MAJOR difficulties of late stage pregnancy (at least the broad strokes) can actually be very easily accounted for in d&d. The model we use has been in use for years. I posted it earlier. Ill repost just so you can see how easy it is to to implement accurately. We play with a lot of doctors too. Its accurate enough to satisfy them. We arent a very politically correct group. We also dont go out of our way to be offensive. We just like verisimilitude.
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Son of the Serpent
Pupil
Always prone (disadvantage also applies to ranged attack ac whereas normally its an advantage)
Penalty to dex skills
Penalty to charisma skills (present or kot depending on percentile roll beginning of day)
Penalty to wisdom skills (like above paranthetical)
Penalty to will saves
Penalty to con saves
Penalty to initiative
Reduced movement speed
Reduced hustle
Reduced number of extra attacks per round
Modified fatigue rules
Some of this applies early some only applies late.
Penalty to dex skills
Penalty to charisma skills (present or kot depending on percentile roll beginning of day)
Penalty to wisdom skills (like above paranthetical)
Penalty to will saves
Penalty to con saves
Penalty to initiative
Reduced movement speed
Reduced hustle
Reduced number of extra attacks per round
Modified fatigue rules
Some of this applies early some only applies late.
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