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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6209548" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have the opposite opinion.  By this you seem to imply that sexuality and promiscuity aren't very strong subjects and that your game is friendly to include those, but unfriendly if anything so controversial as a pregnancy occurs as a result of sexual intercourse.To me this is like a game that wants there to be rampant violence and violence as the preferred means of conflict resolution, but finds genocide, fratricide, murder, or even collateral damage to the innocent 'too strong of a subject'.  The first time I realized this was by accident.  The PC's were hired by a rich merchant to deal with a group of Hobgoblin bandits that were robbing and killing travelers on a pass.   The PC's tracked the bandits to their cave, and proceeded to slaughter the hobgoblins in what was to everyone completely obvious and ordinary behavior.  They got to the back of the cave, to what I'd jotted down as 'tribal common room', and I described the hobgoblin females and children huddled against the back wall in terror and suddenly for everyone (even me) there was an, "Oh.", moment that we'd never had before.   The last time we'd encountered this situation in game, we'd been like 10 and it didn't phase us.  Now, at 15, we realized just how serious what we'd just done was and how serious the scenario I'd created had been.  "What do we do now?"I, as DM, had no answers.  I didn't even realize until the moment it happened that I had asked a question.  Had I wanted to, had I considered it, I could have avoided this moment by assuming that the bandits didn't bring their women and children with them, that they weren't really planning to live here, and removed them from the scene so that neither I nor the players ever thought about it.  But ever since that moment, I've realized that my game isn't less morally problematic if I do so, but more problematic and ought to be - if we were in our right minds (which we weren't until that point) - more offensive.My suspicion is that in a game where sex happens, but unplanned pregnancies don't, the game is much like that - we don't even realize we are posing problems.  The fact that we don't realize it, doesn't mean that we aren't.  The same problem was posed, and answered, when our players were 10 years old.  We just thought very little on it, but the absence of thought made the problem more acute and not less.Your game became serious when it featured sex and/or violence.  You might as well be mature about it.  If you don't want to deal with the pregnancies, banish the sex from your game.  If you don't want to deal with that awkward moment when you realize that the people you've been killing are people too, banish violence from you game.  But to banish those moments from your game and keep the sex and violence, I don't see how you can justify: "Come glut yourself on escapist sex and murder.  No consequences!", isn't less offensive or less emotionally problematic than a player realizing he's just become a father, any more than any fiction that trivializes difficult problems is less offensive or less emotionally problematic.So you are supposing that abortion or unplanned pregnancy is going to be too much for your player to handle because of their life history?  Ok, suppose that that life history is a father than abandoned them, or a family split by adultery.  Is it going to be less emotional for that player to have another player screwing around without consequences?  The topic is itself already a 'strong', which is why I dare say many tables do banish sex from the table.</blockquote>

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