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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3751695" data-attributes="member: 50322">For the record, syphilis is not the only STD and Europe had plenty of them before 1492. Different temples, governments, and societies will handle cure disease differently just as they will define appropriate behavior differently.  For example, in medieval Europe, the charge of rape had a number of definitions, one of which was marrying an adult woman against the will of her father - even if the woman in question went to tremendous lengths to achieve this marriage.  In Victorian England, such an event would have been defined as an elopement and it would have been a scandal to be settled out of court, if possible.  In modern England, such an event would be a purely personal matter, though some neighborhoods or churches might still regard it as a scandal.  It's up to the DM to decide what mores are appropriate to his campaign and to give the players a heads-up about what they are.The same DM who gave us the kinky villains, and who is playing the romantic lead in the RHOD soap opera previously described, once had our party of innocent kids from an isolated village charmed and date-raped by a bunch of satyrs.  We woke up sore and hungover the next morning and dragged ourselves out of the woods as fast as we could.  Soon all the female party members found they were pregnant (100% impregnation rate struck me as a bit extreme, but whatever - he said he'd rolled it).  This might have been a conflict for my character, but this DM also throws massive complex crises at us and we were in a period of being forced to run off in all directions - there was simply too little time and too much risk involved to run around pregnant with babies we hadn't even volunteered for, so we looked for medicinal herbs with explicit warnings against using them when pregnant, opting to take the quick, intense risk of abortion rather than the prolonged, chronic risk of pregnancy.  Obviously, this development could have been a campaign-buster had he misjudged our willingness to deal with such matters in-game.A more immediate result came in the first town we came to. None of us had ever been in a town of more than 100 people before, and my character went wandering off by herself exploring and wound up in the bad part of town confronted by a gang of teenage male thugs with shivs.  She had a short sword and a dagger and two-weapon fighting, but was still low-level.  My first intention was to fight them off with the flats of the blades, but there were seven of them and I realized, as my initiative came up, that Trudy was actually frightened and that, after the satyrs, I didn't in my heart trust the DM not to let the situation turn into a gang-rape if she didn't dominate the fight right from the start.  So she used the edges, and she killed one in the first round.  The thugs evaporated, as did the witnesses, and the local law-enforcement type who had been shadowing her (we were not welcome, though we didn't know it - the BBEG had influence in town) arrested her for murder.  This had a profound effect on the way the campaign proceeded and the character arcs, not only of my character, but of the entire party.The fact that I suddenly didn't trust the DM is an indication of just how important it is to handle these matters carefully.  This whole campaign could have gone sour, and our friendship with it, had I been a different person.</blockquote>

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