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HardcoreD&Dgirl
2015-02-15, 10:03 AM
OK, so last night me and a group of friends got together to play a Valentine's night game of D&D. It was set up to be a one off, but we really liked it.

Me, and my girlfriend, my best friend and his wife (who doesn't often RP), and two other friends got together at my best friend and his wife's house. We were using 5e as the base system but the DM asked to borrow my copy of Book of Erotic Fantasy (3e 3rd party supplement) and was modifying it to fit.

We knew that it was a love theme, but man when we got there it was very different then I thought. SO I got to wondering how raunchy and how sexy people play. In my normal groups we don't do much (I have seen family lines though in some campaign settings.)we normally just joke a bit then skip the parts with details.

Last night was different, we pretty much played 50 shades of D&D (Ok that's a joke I never read those books so I don't know) and so what do the rest of you do?

The story was about a cupid and a succubus who fell in love... neither manipulating the other but true love. They were both being attacked by forces normally aligned with them to break them up. The PCs come in when the fight carries over into the town where we were resting between adventures. So lots of charm and dominate effects thrown around. We had an underground cult to Glasya (asmodius daughter) under the brothel as well. It ended almost as bad as Romeo and Julet. In the end through lots of sex and debauchery it really was a love story... it ended with us finding out the succubus was pregnant with the cupid's child, and us getting her out of the town and to safety by faking her death.

Seto
2015-02-15, 10:42 AM
In D&D, I never had the occasion to play such themes, and I'd generally avoid it unless everyone participates, as it can be unfun when one/two players launch themselves into detailed descriptions as others listen awkwardly.

However, I once played a long-term romance with another PC (it was a Naruto narrativist Pbp forum), which was carefully set up over months out-of-game and more than a year in-game, and finally bloomed, and it was hands-down the best roleplaying experience of my life. It helped that we didn't have to include other PCs, and the other guy was an excellent roleplayer. We didn't roleplay sex (sadly his character died and it was against forum rules anyway), but I wouldn't have had problems doing it.

It's harder to pull off in D&D, though, because of what I mentioned. And unless it's the focus of the whole group, sex is usually best glossed over.

MrNobody
2015-02-15, 11:00 AM
In the games i've played in sex is something that happened (and in a couple of games it happened really often), but it was never played or described.
I've seen relations between PCs, PCs and NPCs, i had one of my players have a "private encounter" with a female brass dragon only to discover (months later) to be the father of a litter of young half-dragons.

In the various group i've played in is usual to leave all the "details" to individual imagination; maybe something slips out in IC conversations but the act of making love is not subject to dice rolls and particular descriptions.

Like i said in a recent post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18819969&postcount=4) Book of erotic fantasy was used here and there but it never played an important role in our campaigns.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-15, 11:54 AM
I never really did much sex stuff in D&D (though some of my players have been a little under-hesitant to engage in some very graphic activities… :smallsigh:), but it's come up here and there, especially in other systems; my preference is to "fade to black" unless I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that every player is comfortable with it.

One of the PCs in an Exalted game had a tryst with the Silent Wind, a psychotic imprisoned titan who had helped shape the world in a former age; we didn't go into particular detail, save that I told her player how the physical act of it almost killed the PC, and how the Silent Wind ended up having a baby as a result (in spite of both participants being female).

VincentTakeda
2015-02-15, 12:31 PM
My players are brewed from equal parts greed, murder, and self preservation... Not much room for pleasures of the heart or the body.

ellindsey
2015-02-15, 02:47 PM
In a recent Champions super-hero game, I played a speedster martial artist character who was essentially a hermaphrodite shape shifting alien. Another player was playing a telekinetic anthromorphic ferret who could split into five identical bodies. Over the course of a several year long campaign, the two of them fell in love. It happened very organically, though them having complimentary personalities and similar backstories (both being essentially lab experiments abandoned by their creators and looking for family). They got married in the campaign epilogue.

We kept any actual sex well off-screen, to preserve the sanity of everyone at the table. (Alien shapeshifter tentacle monster/furry orgy? No thanks.)

Knaight
2015-02-15, 03:15 PM
With sex I'd generally cut to black, though I don't think I've ever had to. With love though, I've GMed a game that was basically a fantasy romance before (occasionally veering into rom-com territory for humor purposes) and it actually worked quite well. Then there's love between friends, siblings, etc. which have all come up even more frequently.

SiuiS
2015-02-15, 03:26 PM
The code for a spoiler block is just "spoiler" not "Sblock" :)


I don't have a group wherein anyone is comfortable enough with anyone else to actually do anything detailed. It's a complex issue, but part of it is that the people I play with just aren't nature.

I've had some play by post games that would have gone there if the forum allowed, but eh.

Vitruviansquid
2015-02-15, 03:29 PM
No. I'd be too nervous about accidentally exposing everyone to mention of one of my sick, deviant sexual fetishes that would cause my players to view me in a different light forever.

Darth Ultron
2015-02-15, 03:34 PM
I've only ever done sex and love with female gamers. Any guy I have ever played with was fine with the sex and love being off screen.

My first all female sex and love game was a drow one. They played sisters of a drow noble house. It was a very mature game.

Another group started as cat-folk slaves for rich people. Another was a group of female knights. Another was a group of female giants...who saw other races as toys....

TheThan
2015-02-15, 03:48 PM
The book of erotic fantasy is a weird book.

The first half or so is well written and somewhat well researched and can really help a player or DM explore love, sex and all that girly stuff in their games in a mature manner.

Then you get to the second half of the book, the parts with the mechanics. Things get really kinky and goofy really fast, it’s as if a completely different team of developers wrote each section. it really throws off the feel of the first section of the book and just... seems weird. Do we really need a wizard prestige class that turns him in to a peeping tom?

My best advice is to simply fade to black when things start to get intimidate.

Obak
2015-02-15, 04:26 PM
Never, weather that is because we a re an all-guys group, our medium age is fairly high or because I'm a bit prude, I can't say.
Although I have the conception that women are much less squeamish about these things, perhaps it is an issue of trust, of our cultural view of sexuality or women being more emotionally mature then men.
I am not really comfortable with love in an mmo either, for me love is something private and personal, same with sex, so it is not an issue of of having describe to Izzy how I gently caress his hand and look his PC deep in the eyes while looking at him over the table (all though that would be even more awkward) but that I can not comfortably roleplay intimacy.

So, I am not comfortable with rping neither love or sex, but I don't have a problem with raunchy jokes in and out of game.

BWR
2015-02-15, 05:19 PM
BoEF is fun. Mongoose's "Nymphology: Blue Magic" in their Encyclopedia Arcane series is hilarious. New monsters like the Bearded Clam, spells like Summon Sexual Partner (you wouldn't believe some of the creatures on the list) or Morning Wood (why not save it for later?), feats like Horn Dog (bonus to social rolls vs. folks you've screwed because you were great in bed), etc.

More seriously, sex and love depends greatly on the game played. More casual games are basically "you go wenching/whatever-the-appropriate-word--for-guys, roll a die to see how well you do" and leave it at that. (menching? guyching? dudeching?) Some games are a bit more detailed on love and romance and seduction but on the whole we fade to black after a Perform (sex) roll. Partially because it's kind of boring for the rest of the group to watch someone waste lots of game time on stuff they aren't part of and isn't plot-relevant (we haven't had much by the way of PC group sex yet) and partially because it probably would get a bit awkward to get terribly detailed.
One on one with my gf, on the other hand, has on occasion been quite a bit more detailed and...involved.

Mr Beer
2015-02-15, 05:25 PM
I game with 4 or 5 other middle aged straight (as far as I know) guys so while there's a certain amount of sexual innuendo for comedy purposes and general goofing around, any P on P romance would be icky for everyone concerned. There are a few rare sex scenes with NPC, but they are done off camera as it were.

We're all a lot more comfortable with mutually visualising gory ultra violence than sex...I suspect that's probably standard for my demographic of RPG-ers.

Hyena
2015-02-15, 05:52 PM
My new RPG party does know that my mind is dark and twisted, but isn't aware just to what to extent - and I don't want to scare them with what's going on inside my head. So, no.
My previous party, however, was playing what I can only call porn with plot (essentially Game of Thrones, but with elves). I usually haven't participated in "porn" part until very recently - it was all "fade to black" instead - but I did do it a few times and didn't enjoy it all that much. An effort was made to conceal the darker side of me.

goto124
2015-02-15, 07:32 PM
So by 'love' did we mean lovemaking?

dps
2015-02-15, 08:28 PM
the act of making love is not subject to dice rolls and particular descriptions.


If it were, would a critical failure mean ED or an unplanned pregnancy? Kind of opposites, but both a type of fail.





:smallbiggrin:

goto124
2015-02-15, 08:30 PM
DM: So the curtains are drawn... now make a Fortitude saving throw! (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=951) Whoops, you rolled a 1. Good luck finding a healer.

Unplanned pregnancy would be way too much IMHO. It's bringing in highly sensitive RL issues to something already... iffy. Leave it at disease.

gom jabbarwocky
2015-02-15, 10:08 PM
I had been roleplaying for a while with the same group before I felt comfortable broaching the subject of romance as a character arc or dramatic device. But I figured, to hell with it, we're all mature adults here, right? Romance is something that we all had exposure to in real life and in most of the media we consume, why leave it out of our games? I discussed with with my fellow players and found that I wasn't the only one who thought it was weird that our games were oddly sexless. It worked out pretty well. Some PCs have loved and have known love in return. It's nice, and allows lots of opportunity for roleplaying more nuanced or complex relationships.

When it gets to the wild thing, the GM usually leaves it to the imagination for the sake of taste - when I GM specifically, I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, so I don't cover anything too explicit. I try not to be too blunt (I'm a classy guy), but the subtext is pretty clear - this is a thing that is happening. If you want to know how it went, use your imagination. This isn't that kind of roleplaying.

HardcoreD&Dgirl
2015-02-15, 10:50 PM
So by 'love' did we mean lovemaking? no the story really did end as a love story... it was kind of cool.


I've only ever done sex and love with female gamers. Any guy I have ever played with was fine with the sex and love being off screen.

My first all female sex and love game was a drow one. They played sisters of a drow noble house. It was a very mature game.

Another group started as cat-folk slaves for rich people. Another was a group of female knights. Another was a group of female giants...who saw other races as toys....

I wonder if the fact that I am a woman changes things...

Solaris
2015-02-15, 11:09 PM
Last night was different, we pretty much played 50 shades of D&D (Ok that's a joke I never read those books so I don't know)

"50 Shades of Grey" and "love story", even "BDSM love story", aren't even in the same conceptual universes as each other.[/soapbox]

Back on-topic, I've never done an in-character romance, even in games where my fiancee is playing with me. Part of it is that I don't generally play very lovable characters (one might joke that they're about as unlovable as I am, but one may not do that within earshot of my fiancee), but mostly it's that none of the people I've played with have been interested in romance. We're playing D&D to kill things and save the world. If we want romance we can do it in real life (an opinion I also hold about the stupidity of roleplaying wenching, getting drunk, and partying in character).

Gritmonger
2015-02-15, 11:29 PM
My best advice is to simply fade to black when things start to get intimidate.

Exactly! I personally don't want to have to role-play getting past another guard to see his baron - best to just leave it all to the imagination. "I intimidate - well, let's just pan to the fireplace..."

Sajiri
2015-02-16, 03:35 AM
I'll admit, my current game Im in has a lot of sexy stuff happening, very graphically. However, it is not the focus of the game (just a side thing that came about because its well known I enjoy the romance parts in bioware games, so the DM made a bunch of 'romance options' as npcs for my character), and the game is just myself and the DM, who is my partner IRL anyway. Sometimes it's fade to black, sometimes we go more in depth if it's going to affect the plot/characters in some way (eg recently my character's dhampir lover hypnotised her in it, so now there's the uncomfortableness that follows that he did such a thing to her).

I don't think I could ever do such scenes if it were a group, or if the DM was anyone else. We dont use rules from BoEF or anything like that, though its possible there may be pregnancy rules...I've told him not to tell me if it incorporates such things, it will just have to be a terrible terrible surprise if it happens :p

I wouldnt have thought it would matter, but since this is a very roleplay focused game, its actually pretty fun and interesting to see how characters and plots progress after such things happen (and it has affected the plot quite a bit so far)

Mutazoia
2015-02-16, 03:49 AM
OK, so last night me and a group of friends got together to play a Valentine's night game of D&D. It was set up to be a one off, but we really liked it.

Me, and my girlfriend, my best friend and his wife (who doesn't often RP), and two other friends got together at my best friend and his wife's house. We were using 5e as the base system but the DM asked to borrow my copy of Book of Erotic Fantasy (3e 3rd party supplement) and was modifying it to fit.

We knew that it was a love theme, but man when we got there it was very different then I thought. SO I got to wondering how raunchy and how sexy people play. In my normal groups we don't do much (I have seen family lines though in some campaign settings.)we normally just joke a bit then skip the parts with details.

Last night was different, we pretty much played 50 shades of D&D (Ok that's a joke I never read those books so I don't know) and so what do the rest of you do?

The story was about a cupid and a succubus who fell in love... neither manipulating the other but true love. They were both being attacked by forces normally aligned with them to break them up. The PCs come in when the fight carries over into the town where we were resting between adventures. So lots of charm and dominate effects thrown around. We had an underground cult to Glasya (asmodius daughter) under the brothel as well. It ended almost as bad as Romeo and Julet. In the end through lots of sex and debauchery it really was a love story... it ended with us finding out the succubus was pregnant with the cupid's child, and us getting her out of the town and to safety by faking her death.

The research has already been done... (http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growfcomic.php?date=20080518)

Raimun
2015-02-16, 05:10 AM
Sure, love and/or sex has happened in games sometimes but it's never been the focus of any game.

Most people I've played with have seemed to undestand that these things are part of life but no one has wanted to play an erotically charged sexventure (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/11). It's the more... regular type of adventures people want to have when they are playing a game. You know, killing the undead or some dragons.

MrNobody
2015-02-16, 07:03 AM
If it were, would a critical failure mean ED or an unplanned pregnancy? Kind of opposites, but both a type of fail.

Amusingly, this happened once in a game i was as a player. After an intercourse the DM rolled a couple of dices, then look at the player and said: "Congratulations! You are pregnant!".

johnbragg
2015-02-16, 07:53 AM
Currently playing in a beer-and-pretzels type campaign, where the Paladin and the Druid are in luuuve. I only joined recently, but it's mostly played for laughs as the Paladin keeps charging into combat to "rescue" the wildshaped Druid, who then has to bail him out.

Any action is off screen, as we go around the table making bestiality and "holy sword" jokes.

In high school, my socially retarded D&D group rolled percentile dice to determine how well we sexed nameless rescued female NPCs. :smallsigh:

Joe the Rat
2015-02-16, 11:47 AM
Okay, the exact shades of blue and purple involved aside, that sounded like a pretty awesome tale all around. Love stories, even in the third person (NPC stories) can be pretty cool. From what I've seen. Sadly, it's not a big part of my gaming experience.

My experiences with sex & love in-game fall in three general categories:

Off Topic. We're not going there. It simply doesn't fit into the game. Now, this doesn't mean we don't get into lengthy discussions of medieval prophylactics and comparative humanoid anatomy out of game, but this is peppered in amongst body functions and rules bickering. For some groups it was actively avoided.

Off Camera. It's something that happens, with little detail. If you want your character to go wenching/menching, you have a wonderful time and the DM hands you the bill. For drinks, obviously. The warrior seeking vengeance for the death of his beloved. The charming rogue who ends up in bed with the villain of the next chapter, and barely makes it out alive. The Drow Classic using her exotic wiles to make new allies and torment the goody-two-shoes half-elf priestess by dating her father. Getting the nervous young hero hooked up with the most dangerous woman on the seven seas. Giving those enchantment-based villains a creepy vibe. Giving those overly hedonistic villains a really creepy vibe. "Away with your dancing girls! But leave the gnome..." Anything involving succubi.

When playing serious, this tends to be the sweet spot for my old groups. That's not to say that you shouldn't get more explicit in-game, but given that most of the players and gm's I've known are not "writers of quality fiction," being more explicit would have ended up purple prose at best, and... really, really not good at the worst. But this does make for obvious tells on plot points. When your dalliance gets more treatment than fade-to-black, you're going to need protection. I recommend Mage Armor and a dagger.

Off the wall. Sex as comedy. Anything related to sex in-game is played for humor, in the body-humor-to-bawdy-humor range. Exaggerated features. Innuendo involving transmutation spells ("No, that was pretty much a single-entendre, Carl"). Halflings get their noses in everyone else's business. Unidentified magic belts. Elven androgyny. Booby traps. Deliverance references. Rabbit season. Abhorrent admirers. Breastplate + light spell. Pretty much the entire reason "mature content" is an oxymoron for most gamers.

Which is not to say that it is all irrelevant jokes. A wizard's attempts to woo Ms. Callipygia the barmaid leads to an entire questline. The sorceress can help solve the illusionists potion-induced transformation issues due to her... intimate knowledge of the potion-maker. Finding a solution to a Pon Farr-like situation leads to making a deal with a dangerous foe. The party has free transportation if the fighter is willing to put up with the advances of the elven diplomat. The warlock uses her assets to turn a fight into a social encounter. The rogue's attempts to seduce women he hasn't even met yet turns a social encounter into combat.

Angel Bob
2015-02-16, 02:51 PM
My D&D group is normally pretty sterile about this sort of thing. Romance/sex are always in the background of the story; they're more of a setting detail. For example, the innkeeper who (on a whim of the DM) took a liking to our group's thief, or the gay couple that the same thief barged in on while breaking into houses. The group's too focused on the (admittedly, very important) plot and stopping the Big Bad; the way the campaign is structured, we just don't have the time or willingness to fool around.

My previous D&D group was a little more eager with these sorts of things, mainly because they played more for comedy than for drama. By the end of the campaign, half of the PCs had slept with one another, mainly because "I sleep with [cleric]" was as legitimate a downtime activity as "I sell the treasure from the last dungeon". Everyone in the group was alright with it and found it entertaining, but it still didn't affect the story very much (primarily because there wasn't very much story to affect). The most significance romance ever had was in the first session, when the party fighter rolled a natural 20 on his check to seduce a guard and evade a dictatorial security measure.

In general, my D&D groups have never been committed enough to roleplaying to make their characters fall in love. It's either one-night stands or complete celibacy, and I'm totally cool with that.

Sith_Happens
2015-02-16, 06:28 PM
The campaigns I've been in so far have had occasional rom-com shenanigans (both PC/NPC and PC/PC) and lots of sex. The latter bit generally being about one step short of "fade to black," plus some relevant rolls for giggles.

Coidzor
2015-02-18, 02:26 AM
The odd bit of juvenile humor and some exclamations of "brown-chicken-brown-cow" or even "bow-chicka-wow-wow," but so far everything's been either fade to black or just... not even that but implied that there's something going on, y'know?

etrpgb
2015-02-18, 04:10 AM
Simply D&D is the wrong tool... There is a incredible lack of rules for interesting social interaction. Rules-wise everything can be solved with a Diplomacy check or a spell like dominate person.

For more serious romantic adventures something different is needed.

goto124
2015-02-18, 04:15 AM
I've heard of social combat, which apparently is like applying the same style of normal combat mechanics to social situations... would it be related to this topic?

etrpgb
2015-02-18, 04:37 AM
Definitely, but D&D has nothing of the that kind, where did you read about it?

goto124
2015-02-18, 04:53 AM
It was quite some time ago in another thread... it referred to non-DnD systems such as Game of Thrones, IIRC. Sorry if I wasn't clear on the 'non-DnD' bit.

The Insanity
2015-02-18, 05:14 AM
I have a girlfriend. Bt which I mean I have adult games regularly with her. When we play only the two of us (a solo game, I DM and she's the player or vice versa) there's always sex involved.

Mystral
2015-02-18, 06:52 AM
Many of my characters have a sexlife or are motivated partly by love or lust. It's just part of the human (or elven, or whatever) condition. I don't play it out on the table, of course. It's just something that my characters do.

DigoDragon
2015-02-18, 08:49 AM
I'm currently in a Fallout-type game and half the party sees 'bed-action' fairly regularly. My character is trying to go the relationship route first and has gotten a fairly close one with an NPC. We're all mature adults so we have no problems with this kind of role playing.

VincentTakeda
2015-02-18, 08:50 AM
I suddenly want to create heraldry for my character that features a brown chicken and a brown cow.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-18, 09:09 AM
Sex and love have been part of my roleplaying hobby from the start, though they rarely emerge in games of D&D, specifically... unless we're talking Lamentations of the Flame Princess retroclone, in which case both come up when they've gone horribly wrong. Book of Erotic Fantasy is really cool, though, and I had great fun making a Paladin/Sacred Prostitute for 3.5 edition. Sadly, I didn't get to play that character. BoEF is also good for when you need to figure out how long you will need to prostitute yourself before you have enough money to get a real job. *nod*

goto124
2015-02-18, 09:51 AM
Do prostitutes roll Fort saves...?

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-18, 09:55 AM
For catching sexually transmitted diseases? Yes. There may be some for pregnancy too, but the actual chance of becoming pregnant is a different check. And prolonged intimate encounters are constitution checks. The check to actually please your partner is a charisma-based skillcheck.

Chronos
2015-02-18, 11:05 AM
My most recent character had a developing romantic relationship with another PC. It was kind of inevitable that he'd end up falling in love with her: He was a young male gnome who was basically a fey fanboy, who could never understand why, despite his own fey ancestry, all of his own magic ended up dark, gloomy, and eerie (he'd really rather throw around rainbows instead of eldritch blasts). She was a young female nature-loving gnome beguiler, which meant that she really did fight by throwing around rainbows. Oddly enough, the other player and I (who've known each other for decades) didn't plan this in advance at all. And no, we didn't find it at all awkward.

Unfortunately, the game fell apart before the relationship had a chance to really develop.

Waker
2015-02-18, 02:37 PM
I've had a number of characters over the years who've done the long-term relationship or the one-night stand. And despite having done this with a number of different DMs, the fade to black route seems to be the most common solution. When things start getting sexy, time for a scene transition.
In each of the situations, it's been PC/NPC. Haven't had any hookups with other players, but that is primarily because it needs to fit with the character's personality.

gom jabbarwocky
2015-02-18, 06:52 PM
Something that has never come up in my games are relationships between PCs. PCs will hook up with NPCs, but PCs are usually content to just be friends. My best guess is that players are unsure if the other player will find this awkward, but that is an unsatisfying (though likely) explanation.

Either that, or I poisoned the well early on in a Call of Cthulhu game where one of the PCs discovered she was the half-sibling of another one - just before coming across the ritual Keenness of Two Alike. I thought she had lost enough sanity by then that she might attempt to seduce the ignorant PC for the arcane knowledge, but the player was too squicked out by the idea to consider the possibility. This precedent may have given my players the impression that if their PCs hook up in one of my games, I'll produce some revelation that I planned it as part of some gross deviant plot intended to horrify them.:smalltongue:

There was a game I played in once where I considered having my character cheat on his (NPC) girlfriend with one of the PCs, but suspected that the player of the PC carried of torch for me OOC, so I figured that would be weird and didn't do that. I kind of wish things had been different, then, but oh well. She doesn't game with us anymore, but now I'm her SO, so there's that.

Coidzor
2015-02-18, 07:10 PM
I suddenly want to create heraldry for my character that features a brown chicken and a brown cow.

:smallamused: Happy to be of service, then.

Tengu_temp
2015-02-18, 07:24 PM
Not a DND player, but this isn't the DND subforum so **** it:

Many of my characters developed romantic feelings for other party members as the game went on. Love, like other strong emotions, can bring a lot to the game - it can create scenes that are cute or funny, but also add weight and drama to already serious ones. Inter-party romance is not something for every game; it requires a generally mature group, with strong IC/OOC separation, and bold enough not to be shy about such things (playing online does wonders here, I found out). But if you have the right people, it really can improve your game a lot.

Some of that love ended up getting physical, but then we always cut to black - romance is one thing, but smut is another, and I like to keep my games PG-13 rated.

When someone says "the characters in my game are too busy with important things for love", it sounds to me like a wasted opportunity - and not because of love, but because it means the characters are most likely also too busy to have hobbies, to have fun, to just sit down and relax once in a while and do something unrelated to saving the world. All this stuff your characters do during downtime builds up their personality, and inter-party bonds, like no other.

Also, if your DM tells you to roll for STDs after your character has sex, he's probably an *******. If he tells you to roll for accidental pregnancy, he's probably That Guy and it's a good sign you should consider jumping ship.

Hyena
2015-02-18, 07:39 PM
Oh, one short thing.

In one of games I took part in, there were two characters, a lawful evil illusionist and a chaotic evil rogue, both served in the army and were exemplary soldiers. They also were both criminals and complete evil bastards - each in their own way. The rogue was prone to homicidal rages and killed people because of petty grudges. The illusionist went on crime sprees because he was an attention whore and dished out fates worse then death at a drop of hat. Naturally, they soon started working together and somehow managed to not kill each other because of some little disagreement.
Then they had a one night stand. Then they became friends with benefits. True, there was no love to speak of, but what's really funny, though, is that their relationship, despite complete lack of romantic connection between them (and despite them both being horrible murderers), lasted for many (in-game and out-of-game) years and outlived any other relationship in the game, including those the good guys had. They had a completely healthy and stable relationship based on mutual respect and it is still going on.

Icewraith
2015-02-18, 07:49 PM
For catching sexually transmitted diseases? Yes. There may be some for pregnancy too, but the actual chance of becoming pregnant is a different check. And prolonged intimate encounters are constitution checks. The check to actually please your partner is a charisma-based skillcheck.

Really, the check to please your partner should use the attribute of either your or their choice. Play to your strengths, or to whatever works best for your partner.

NWA
2015-02-19, 04:39 AM
This topic is something definitely not everyone is comfortable with. Therefore, I prefer when it is left off the table. Our current party doesn't take it seriously and we prefer to joke over sex scenes if they are necessary to the plot at all.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-19, 08:08 AM
Also, if your DM tells you to roll for STDs after your character has sex, he's probably an *******. If he tells you to roll for accidental pregnancy, he's probably That Guy and it's a good sign you should consider jumping ship.

I very much disagree. If a game has logical outcomes of fighting and other skill uses governed by die rolls, it's perfectly valid to have logical outcomes of sex be governed by it too. As with all things, the way to avoid such in games with this philosophy is to not engage in the behaviours that would logically entail these things.

Ergo, if you don't want to deal with logical results of sex, don't do it in-game.

I see comments like yours stemming from an attitude that has deeper problems with random chance and events. But I'll deal with that in a different thread, I'll link you to the relevant post when it's done.

EDIT: Here's the link. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18844991&postcount=212) The post is about character death, but applies to the theme at hand just as well. Thinking the GM is a jerk or generally maladjusted because he makes decisions on in-game events based on die rolls is ignoring that it's the GM's job. If anything, it's fairer than the GM just saying you caught a disease or got pregnant . :smalltongue:


Really, the check to please your partner should use the attribute of either your or their choice. Play to your strengths, or to whatever works best for your partner.

That doesn't work with the design assumptions of D&D 3.5. There's a pretty good reason why skills have their basic abilities locked - it prevents single ability from dominating the game.

DigoDragon
2015-02-19, 08:51 AM
Ergo, if you don't want to deal with logical results of sex, don't do it in-game.

Also, communication of these results between the GM and players before the game starts helps a lot!
That way no one is surprised at the outcome should it happen. :)

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-19, 08:57 AM
Also, communication of these results between the GM and players before the game starts helps a lot!
That way no one is surprised at the outcome should it happen. :)

True, but this is a corner case where it shouldn't be necessary, as sex is a real-world thing and most people who'd think to involve it in a game are already aware of what it could lead to. It's the same as how you shouldn't really need a specific explanation for how falling down the stairs might hurt you, or how sticking your hand into a fire might burn you.

Sometimes it is necessary, though, but I'm not averse to doing a bit of sex ed on the side when a situation requires. :smallamused:

goto124
2015-02-19, 10:04 AM
Trouble is... why put a risk to sex? For combat, you take the risk of losing health and dying because there are clear benefits to engaging in combat- killing the enemy, clearing the way to wherever you need to go, loot, etc. Diplomancy has benefits as well. But sex is often more of an RP side flavor thing. It doesn't really affect the game most of the time. PCs typically don't engage in a lot of plot-relevant sex anyway. Risks make you think twice before doing something. Is that even required for sex, which gives no reward other than RP? Why punish them for trying to flesh out their characters a bit? It's not disruptive RP. It's not even part of the plot. STDs should be needless in many games.

Also, by default in most games, pregnancy and STDs do not happen. So yes you HAVE to tell players STDs are a thing in your game, otherwise they'll assume it doesn't exist in-universe, for the reasons mentioned in the above paragraph.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-19, 11:03 AM
Goto, if you examine your attitude, you'll find it to be tautological. You ask "why put risk into sex?" when "sex doesn't affect anything", but the sole reason why sex doesn't affect anything is because players don't assign logical real-life risks and consequences to it. The moment you accept logical outcomes of sex as valid in-game events, it becomes something that can alter the course of the game and something the players and their characters need to think about before they engage in it. It becomes a drivign force for character motivation and the chain of events you somewhat annoyingly refer to as "plot".

The second flaw in your attitude is bad distinction between in-universe versus in-game. "Like Earth unless otherwise noted" is the default assumption of RPG settings for a reason - it tells players that all things not specifically excluded can be expected to happen somewhere in the world, even if they don't make an appearance during session. This so that the GM doesn't have to specifically allow for things that could happen to people in reality. See above examples of falling down the stairs and burning your hand.

"Sex has no consequences" is the break from reality the GM needs to establish beforehand - not the other way around.

DigoDragon
2015-02-19, 11:11 AM
It's the same as how you shouldn't really need a specific explanation for how falling down the stairs might hurt you, or how sticking your hand into a fire might burn you.

It's a fair point, but I have been surprised before at what kind of things some players need an explanation for. :smallbiggrin:

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-19, 11:31 AM
The upside is that honest-to-God ignorance is usually easier to fix than the sort of doublethink arising from bad assumptions. "You didn't say my character could become pregnant!" is a lot more convincing when voiced by a 10-year-old, than when it's said by a grown adult with kids. :smallamused:

jqavins
2015-02-19, 01:03 PM
Love: In my games, both as DM and player, PC-PC and PC-NPC relationships of all sorts are often role played, including romances now and then. Gushy stuff is limited, because it rapidly gets boring for everybody else, so we move on.

Back when my wife and I were just dating, we were in several games together and had romantically linked characters in only two of them. But one friend had the idea that we did this all the time, and overtly asked us not to in a new game she was starting up. Just to give her a tweak, when our characters first met they called out each other's names and rushed into each other's arms, then exchanged cheek kisses and started catching up on family; they were cousins.

Sex: Similar to above, but it is sharply limited because it is both awkward and boring for everybody else, so we fade to black. But, if the players are so inclined, the in-character role playing has been known to continue later in private.

Once in a while the degree to which one or both characters has been satisfied has been deemed relevant or just fun to determine, so a CON and/or DEX check is made. But I won't discuss it any further because...

I'd like to have a discussion of possible mechanics rules for sex (let's not call it "the crunch" this time) in a mature way, but I once asked a moderator if that would be acceptable here and was told it is not.

jqavins
2015-02-19, 01:16 PM
Simply D&D is the wrong tool...
Heh heh, tool.

Sorry.

Tengu_temp
2015-02-19, 01:23 PM
I very much disagree. If a game has logical outcomes of fighting and other skill uses governed by die rolls, it's perfectly valid to have logical outcomes of sex be governed by it too. As with all things, the way to avoid such in games with this philosophy is to not engage in the behaviours that would logically entail these things.

Ergo, if you don't want to deal with logical results of sex, don't do it in-game.


You see this as realism. I see this as the DM thinking "hur hur, let's punish the PCs for having sex instead of participating in my adventures, and have some fun at their expense!" and using realism as an excuse. Also, if it was two PCs, I doubt they'll like the implication that one of them had an undetected STD before.

As for burdening a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy, it's similar to raping a PC - yes, realistically it might happen, but unless you're absolutely sure everyone at the table is fine with it, you don't do that, because it can easily make the game not fun and uncomfortable for the player and everyone involved and make you look like That Guy, DM Edition. Especially if the player is also female in RL.

Sith_Happens
2015-02-19, 02:14 PM
As for burdening a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy, it's similar to raping a PC - yes, realistically it might happen, but unless you're absolutely sure everyone at the table is fine with it, you don't do that, because it can easily make the game not fun and uncomfortable for the player and everyone involved and make you look like That Guy, DM Edition. Especially if the player is also female in RL.

I myself witnessed a group member switch characters because the DM was new, played the "unplanned pregnancy" card, and I waited too long afterwards before explaining the above to him.

SiuiS
2015-02-19, 02:29 PM
No. I'd be too nervous about accidentally exposing everyone to mention of one of my sick, deviant sexual fetishes that would cause my players to view me in a different light forever.

I had this conversation recently. It's reflexive, yes, but in general if you're with a group that can handle the topic anyway, they should be able to avoid assuming you, personally, are indulging in bawdy desire and fanservice with your RP choices.

I don't expect people to think I'm racist when I play a racist character. It's ridiculous that I have to worry about who thinks I'm promiscuous or immoral because of a romance arc – or even just a crude character going for release.


and all that girly stuff

:confused:


True, but this is a corner case where it shouldn't be necessary, as sex is a real-world thing and most people who'd think to involve it in a game are already aware of what it could lead to. It's the same as how you shouldn't really need a specific explanation for how falling down the stairs might hurt you, or how sticking your hand into a fire might burn you.

Sometimes it is necessary, though, but I'm not averse to doing a bit of sex ed on the side when a situation requires. :smallamused:

The issue is not consequence. It is DM decision points and what that implies. If every. Single. Partner. You find has a venereal disease, it means the DM is (at best) horribly misinformed about how these "consequences a" actually work or occur.


You see this as realism. I see this as the DM thinking "hur hur, let's punish the PCs for having sex instead of participating in my adventures, and have some fun at their expense!" and using realism as an excuse. Also, if it was two PCs, I doubt they'll like the implication that one of them had an undetected STD before.

As for burdening a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy, it's similar to raping a PC - yes, realistically it might happen, but unless you're absolutely sure everyone at the table is fine with it, you don't do that, because it can easily make the game not fun and uncomfortable for the player and everyone involved and make you look like That Guy, DM Edition. Especially if the player is also female in RL.

I partially disagree with the pregnacy issue, but again, because any group where this is happening should be mature enough that you can roll with it.

I find the idea of "oops, reality is slightly intruding on my hectic genocidal murder schedule, guess I can't adventure for a while and will have social ramifications" to be a good game basis sometimes.

Lord Lemming
2015-02-19, 02:35 PM
One possible solution you might keep in mind is the assumption that the PC is taking some sort of precaution during the act. If the act isn't explicitly described, you don't really have a reason to assume the PC is being careless.

A analogy might be a fighter going into an combat encounter. The player might forget to mention that his character drew their sword prior to the battle; but I would be irritated with a DM who waits for them to close to combat range before mentioning "Hey, you didn't draw your weapon, so you can't do that!" (Unless there are special circumstances, such as a surprise ambush where the characters have no time to prepare, and the move action needed to draw the sword matters.)

Similarly, if the DM waits until after the deed to say "Hey, you didn't (such and such an action to avoid unplanned consequences), I'm going to spring (such and such a consequence) on you!"; it might not be unfair, but I would find it annoying to say the least.

So, just assume that the characters do things sensibly unless specifically mentioned otherwise. It might not be the best way to go about things, and it might not be your preference; but I think it strikes a reasonable balance between realism and convenience.

Coidzor
2015-02-19, 02:58 PM
Also, communication of these results between the GM and players before the game starts helps a lot!
That way no one is surprised at the outcome should it happen. :)

Or don't have D&D sex without various forms of contraception also being on the table.

Because if they're not mature enough to deal with an unopened box of condoms sitting next to the DM screen, they're not mature enough to soberly discuss STD risks to their fictional characters. :smallamused:

Although, frankly, the idea of a female adventurer choosing not to use contraceptives and also not to take maternity leave is, well, it breaks my suspension of disbelief completely and makes me think that someone has, of all things, an agenda. *shudder*

Edit: Well, ok, that or we're preparing to do a "Five Adventurers and a Baby Half-Dragon" sit com where the unfitness of adventurers as parents is being played for laughs in a comedic/joke game.

Thankfully miscarriages aren't funny. Though I'm sure some people are working on that as I type and you read.


I had this conversation recently. It's reflexive, yes, but in general if you're with a group that can handle the topic anyway, they should be able to avoid assuming you, personally, are indulging in bawdy desire and fanservice with your RP choices.

I don't expect people to think I'm racist when I play a racist character. It's ridiculous that I have to worry about who thinks I'm promiscuous or immoral because of a romance arc – or even just a crude character going for release.

It can be distasteful to play a character who is racist against IRL people, though, especially if it's not done right from the get-go with full disclosure, or, worse, one springs it on a fellow player who is, y'know, of that particular ethnicity against whom one's character is racist.

And, again, that entirely depends upon the individual's comportment. If you give me reason to think you're storing up spank material for after the game, I'm going to be skeeved out. If you don't, then I'm likely not to care two figs as long as you don't bog down the game on subjects I find to be, quite frankly, rather boring from how I've encountered them so far and how others have discussed them.

I suppose it could just be that I'm just not interested in sex unless I'm invested in a character that wants to have sex or it's in meatspace and I could be having sex as a result of context and sequences of events or it could be that I've just never played with people who've put in the hours to get good at sexual RP or who had much of an interest in it to begin with.


The issue is not consequence. It is DM decision points and what that implies. If every. Single. Partner. You find has a venereal disease, it means the DM is (at best) horribly misinformed about how these "consequences a" actually work or occur.

Schrodinger's STIs would suggest that the DM is out to get someone, aye. Or has an agenda of their own.


I find the idea of "oops, reality is slightly intruding on my hectic genocidal murder schedule, guess I can't adventure for a while and will have social ramifications" to be a good game basis sometimes.

I greatly prefer that to be the focus of the campaign, rather than something that only accidentally steals the BBEG's thunder as he's shushed midway through his evil speech because he woke the baby and everyone has to stand by awkwardly until someone coughs politely and says that we can probably start trying to stove one another's heads in now if you can't remember your place, Dark Lord Vissilian.


:confused:

There are rather few things more female or feminine for mammals than gestating an embryonic life form inside their womb or laying fertilized eggs wherever platypi and echidnas lay their eggs.

jqavins
2015-02-19, 05:45 PM
You see this as realism. I see this as the DM thinking "hur hur, let's punish the PCs for having sex instead of participating in my adventures, and have some fun at their expense!" and using realism as an excuse.

How is it punnishment? You punnish someone by taking something away that they either have or are otherwise entitled to. The underlying disagreement is whether or not characters are entitled to consequence-free sex. If they're not - and I don't believe they are - then dealing with consequences isn't taking anythinfg away, and is not in any way punnative. As a DM, I like lots of RP, during adventures, is short periods between adventures, and during down time. I would never even concider punnishing or penalizing characters for whatever they do in their off time, but that doesn't mean they are entitled to do any off-time activities they like without reasonable, realistic consequences, like risks of STDs and pregnency.


Also, if it was two PCs, I doubt they'll like the implication that one of them had an undetected STD before.
Now here, I agree with you, except I'd put it another way. It's not a matter of that they wouldn't like it, but players are entitled to know their characters' states of health (unless there is a specific reason to the contrary) so they shouldn't be walking around with latent STDs. Therefore, there is no disease roll needed after PC-PC sex, and often not after PC-NPC sex depending on the NPC. But after a night or picking up strangers or whoring, there is.


As for burdening a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy, it's similar to raping a PC - yes, realistically it might happen, but unless you're absolutely sure everyone at the table is fine with it, you don't do that...
Please, Please, let's not go down the "It's like rape" road. Rape is a heinous violent act for which the victim is in no part at fault. Pregancy is not a crime, does not have a victim (even though it has an effected person) and is the result of a two person act so, unless rape is introduced, is both people's fault should one want to assign fault at all. I agree with not introducing the rape of PCs into a game, but that has no connection whatever to acknowledging a risk of pregnancy after consentual sex.


Especially if the player is also female in RL.
What the what? The whole idea of role playing is that the character is not the player. A female player with a pregnent female character or a male player with a pregnant female character, it makes no difference. Unless someone (male or female) is carrying some sort of emotional baggage such that the pregnancy of the charicter makes that player-character separation too difficult; in that case, this player would probably be happier not having RP sex at all.


The issue is not consequence. It is DM decision points and what that implies. If every. Single. Partner. You find has a venereal disease.
No, the implication is that some of the partners you find have a venerial disease. If the partner is an established character then the likelyhood can be judged - from none for a fellow PC to very high for a well known gutter whore - and the chance of catching an STD ban be set accordingly. If the partner is not an established character but rather a more-or-less random NPC, then the chance is set with less precision based on circumstances, from quite low for a just-met fellow adventurer, to high for a notorious rake, to very high for a random gutter whore. Even saying that the chance is never zero if the partner is not known doesn't mean that every unknown NPC is contageous, just that you never know which ones are.

Solaris
2015-02-19, 06:19 PM
I don't expect people to think I'm racist when I play a racist character. It's ridiculous that I have to worry about who thinks I'm promiscuous or immoral because of a romance arc – or even just a crude character going for release.

This is an entirely reasonable thing to think, but the last group I played with has led me to believe people aren't as reasonable about that sort of thing as you might hope. I've been accused of racism because I played a bigoted elf who was keenly aware of the fact that everyone in the group was going to be dead of old age (and their grandchildren reaching adulthood) before he hit middle-aged.
(The fact that they were perfectly okay with another player being straight-up racist and using made-up slurs against elves, though... well, there's a reason that group no longer plays at my apartment, nor I with them.)

Some people are astonishingly stupid about keeping players and their characters separated.

goto124
2015-02-19, 09:03 PM
"The underlying disagreement is whether or not characters are entitled to consequence-free sex."

Interesting. So when you play a tabletop, you assume you can get STDs and pregnancy by default? Because in most stories, unless they specifically revolve around those sort of things, characters do have that entitlement- such consequences of sex are avoided to let the main plot move on. RPGs usually aren't about STIs and unwanted babies. The DM could make it clear about how sex works in the game, but the need to actually use the rulings may come up only long after it's forgetten. If a player has her PC have sex, it's good chance she expects NOT to suffer its realities, and the DM should at the very least, bring the issue up before the deed is done.

I personally find STDs and pregnancy to be on the extreme side of realism, to the point of 'too realistic', to be honest.

jqavins
2015-02-19, 09:55 PM
"The underlying disagreement is whether or not characters are entitled to consequence-free sex."

Interesting. So when you play a tabletop, you assume you can get STDs and pregnancy by default?
Yes. Absolutely.

I've had characters who frequently went wenching - even renting out a whole brothel for catered orgies after successful adventures - and I completely expected disease rolls, because that sort of behavior comes with risk, and that risk is reflected in game unless there's an in-game reason it shouldn't be. And I had to pay for Cure Disease spells a time or two. I have a friend whose bard prays nightly that her goddess will keep her infertile. If I make a down-time hobby of big game hunting with a spear and no armor, I expect to endure the occasional injury.

I second this: the world setting in a tabletop medieval fantasy RPG is assumed to be like Earth with particular exceptions. Exceptions like humanoid races and monsters. Exceptions like magic. Exceptions like extraordinary sexual equality. And yes, exceptions that arrise from historical misconceptions are understood to exist undetected. But and exception like "This activity, which was risky in historical Earth, is not risky here" does not exist by assumption. So if the GM (or group concensus or some other recognized world building authority) hasn't said that sex is risk free then it isn`t risk free.

Mr Beer
2015-02-19, 09:58 PM
Yes. Absolutely.

I've had characters who frequently went wenching - even renting out a whole brothel for catered orgies after successful adventures - and I completely expected disease rolls, because that sort of behavior comes with risk, and that risk is reflected in game unless there's an in-game reason it shouldn't be. And I had to pay for Cure Disease spells a time or two. I have a friend whose bard prays nightly that her goddess will keep her infertile. If I make a down-time hobby of big game hunting with a spear and no armor, I expect to endure the occasional injury.

I second this: the world setting in a tabletop medieval fantasy RPG is assumed to be like Earth with particular exceptions. Exceptions like humanoid races and monsters. Exceptions like magic. Exceptions like extraordinary sexual equality. And yes, exceptions that arrise from historical misconceptions are understood to exist undetected. But and exception like "This activity, which was risky in historical Earth, is not risky here" does not exist by assumption. So if the GM (or group concensus or some other recognized world building authority) hasn't said that sex is risk free then it isn`t risk free.

Seconded.

I mean, if it was my game, I would often handwave, but if someone insisted on celebrating each successful campaign with an extensive whoremongering session, it would be remiss of me not to roll for unintended consequences.

"Do stuff, something happens" is kind of the whole bit with RPGs.

Sajiri
2015-02-19, 11:07 PM
While Im all for realism and consequence, I think that, just as how you should discuss and make sure everyone in the group is comfortable with including love/sex (if its more than simple fade to black thing) you should discuss if its going to include the consequences mentioned, just to avoid these sort of situations.

It should go both ways though, if the players dont find out if pregnancy for example should be happening, the DM should find out if they plan to use contraception (if it exists) or whatever preventative measures they might (or might not) take before springing such a thing on them. Maybe if it's once or twice I'd let it slide, although if the players were doing that a lot, I'd probably start at least hinting they might want to be more careful.

In the game Im a player of, the only consequences at first were of the social kind, until I jokingly asked if protection exists in this game world which prompted the conversation of "oh, yeah, I guess there's this. Is your character making use of it? Should I add pregnancy rules to the game?" Since neither myself nor the DM had brought it up to begin with when we knew to begin with that this sort of stuff was going to be in the game, he gave me the chance to retcon it if I desired that my character was using contraceptives

Gritmonger
2015-02-19, 11:10 PM
a) I'm sure there's already a contraception cantrip
b) It's probably only rarely seen use as it's a Wizard school spell.
c) The Bard might know it, but more often that not puts the responsibility on their partner.

Solaris
2015-02-20, 01:20 AM
"The underlying disagreement is whether or not characters are entitled to consequence-free sex."

Interesting. So when you play a tabletop, you assume you can get STDs and pregnancy by default? Because in most stories, unless they specifically revolve around those sort of things, characters do have that entitlement- such consequences of sex are avoided to let the main plot move on. RPGs usually aren't about STIs and unwanted babies. The DM could make it clear about how sex works in the game, but the need to actually use the rulings may come up only long after it's forgetten. If a player has her PC have sex, it's good chance she expects NOT to suffer its realities, and the DM should at the very least, bring the issue up before the deed is done.

I personally find STDs and pregnancy to be on the extreme side of realism, to the point of 'too realistic', to be honest.

I can see what you're saying here, I think. While acknowledging that it's realistic for these kinds of things to happen, you're saying that they should be handwaved away like characters using the bathroom.
That... actually makes a lot of sense. Unless there's an adventure involved that the rest of the party can enjoy, it's best to just wave off that sort of stuff as it doesn't contribute anything good to the game.

The Insanity
2015-02-20, 02:19 AM
"The underlying disagreement is whether or not characters are entitled to consequence-free sex."

Interesting. So when you play a tabletop, you assume you can get STDs and pregnancy by default?
Of course. That's why I take steps to avoid such things, like in real life.


Because in most stories, unless they specifically revolve around those sort of things, characters do have that entitlement- such consequences of sex are avoided to let the main plot move on.
You know why Joey (from the show Friends)had no pregnancy problems, even though he slept with many women on weekly basis? Condoms.


If a player has her PC have sex, it's good chance she expects NOT to suffer its realities, and the DM should at the very least, bring the issue up before the deed is done.
If she doesn't want negative consequences for having sex, she shouldn't have sex or do something to avoid those consequences. It's not like she has no options.

goto124
2015-02-20, 04:47 AM
If she doesn't want negative consequences for having sex, she shouldn't have sex or do something to avoid those consequences. It's not like she has no options.

The paragraph you quoted asked for her to KNOW there were consequences in the first place. 2 posts above refer to toilet activities. The idea's similar.


EDIT: It's similar to another problem. The DM lines a path with lots of warning signs saying 'death befalls those who walk this way'. Unfortunately, in previous games the player was in, those 'warning signs' mean nothing but point out the way to kill the BBEG. So the player follows the signs... and dies. And wonders what happened and why things turned out that way. I could link to the thread if I could find it...

The Insanity
2015-02-20, 04:51 AM
Why WOULDN'T there be consequences?

jqavins
2015-02-20, 07:14 AM
EDIT: It's similar to another problem. The DM lines a path with lots of warning signs saying 'death befalls those who walk this way'. Unfortunately, in previous games the player was in, those 'warning signs' mean nothing but point out the way to kill the BBEG. So the player follows the signs... and dies. And wonders what happened and why things turned out that way. I could link to the thread if I could find it...
Wait, that sounds like an example I might have used, but it's being used by the other side. Are you suggesting that the DM should have warned the players that sometimes signs mean what they say? That players are in the right to assume those signs only mean "This way to the bad guy?"

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-20, 08:39 AM
You see this as realism. I see this as the DM thinking "hur hur, let's punish the PCs for having sex instead of participating in my adventures, and have some fun at their expense!" and using realism as an excuse. Also, if it was two PCs, I doubt they'll like the implication that one of them had an undetected STD before.

Yeah, this is again a signifier of deeper distrust of a GM than the actual behaviour warrants.

Like Goto, you're assuming there's a divide between what the game is supposed to be about, and what the characters are doing, when in truth the game is supposed to be about what the characters are doing. Let's replace STDs with some other of disease. Lots of games, D&D especially, have rules for such, including diseases that can remain undetected for long periods. If, instead of a simple STD, it's lycantrophy or vampirism, you would likely assume the disease is the "GM's adventure", or at least part of it.

The second flaw is the idea that random events are there to punish players. As with injury and death in combat, they're not. They're there to choose between multiple events, decide the course of game and to add game content. Let's talk about saving throws for a moment - what was their purpose and intent. The whole concept stems from the idea that some unwanted things should, by all rights, happen to player characters, but since player characters are protagonists of the game, it's fairer to the player to give the character, even if it would be unrealistic. But on the flipside, some results always succeed or fail, for the enemies just as well, so that no character is entirely untouchable - this keeps players on their toes, prevents the game from halting and allows for real element of surprise.

Rolling for STDs and pregnancy is perfectly in line with said philosophy. As I implied earlier, a GM who's really out to punish you will not roll - he will simply dictate what happens. Whether that's pregnancy, being surprised by xenomorphs or rocks fall, everyone dies.


As for burdening a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy, it's similar to raping a PC - yes, realistically it might happen, but unless you're absolutely sure everyone at the table is fine with it, you don't do that, because it can easily make the game not fun and uncomfortable for the player and everyone involved and make you look like That Guy, DM Edition. Especially if the player is also female in RL.

As a person who's run Death Love Doom to two girls and their mother, I'm far more confident in both people's ability to deal with surprising shock content, and in my own ability to describe them unoffensively, than you are.

Nevermind that occasionally, players feeling uncomfortable is part of the point. It's a continuum - good humor, good horror and building tension all require a tinge of discomfort. Not all discomfort is the sort that will automatically ruin a game and make players hate each other- The idea that a game should never stray beyond preset comfort zone is awfully limiting and binary attitude towards player feelings.


Because in most stories, unless they specifically revolve around those sort of things, characters do have that entitlement- such consequences of sex are avoided to let the main plot move on.

RPGs don't work like most of fiction does. Even if they did, your viewpoint would still be limited to a handful genre. See any soap opera for how sex and its consequences are the mainplot.

But in RPGs, the default is that whatever the players choose to do with their characters and consequences of that are the plot. The entirety of it. Most of things that are handwaved are still presumed to happen on the background, because by far and large they're necessary for the characters and universe to work - the reason why they can be glossed over is because there's no meaningful choice associated with them. If there's fresh air available, characters who need to breathe can be assumed to do so because the alternative isn't really feasible. Same for going to the toilet, or eating.

But things change the moment something defies the status quo. Choosing whether to breathe or not becomes meaningful if there's poison in the air. Management of food supplies becomes meaningful during long wilderness travel. Choosing whether to go to the loo becomes meaningful if there's a murder victim there. So on and so forth.

And here's the kicker: rolls for stuff like catching disease exist to check whether the status quo is changed. Because if it is, suddenly the character needs to reconsider their options. In other words: the story where two characters having sex has no consequences and is never mentioned again is the one where the roll of dice indicated no consequences. The soap opera with STDs and pregnancy in the focus is the one where the roll did indicate consequences.

Again; if a GM is really out to get you, they will not roll. They will not allow for both possibilities. They will simply dictate what happens.

DigoDragon
2015-02-20, 08:47 AM
While Im all for realism and consequence, I think that, just as how you should discuss and make sure everyone in the group is comfortable with including love/sex (if its more than simple fade to black thing) you should discuss if its going to include the consequences mentioned, just to avoid these sort of situations.

Yeah, it really just comes down to communication before the game begins so that everyone is aware.

Telonius
2015-02-20, 08:49 AM
I'm pretty sure they addressed the subject several times in Dragon magazine - should be in the "What's New with Phil and Dixie" archives (http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growf.html) somewhere.
:smallbiggrin:

Personally, when I'm the DM, this is something I always address before the game starts. I ask them individually what sorts of things they'd be interested in or comfortable with (or not). My shorthand version is asking them to give me a movie rating for the game they'd like to play, for both sex and violence.

Since we're gaming at my house, and my 5-year-old is in attendance, the game has gotten significantly more kid-friendly. It has made for some much more interesting innuendos, since they have to be smart enough to sail over the kid's head.

jqavins
2015-02-20, 08:59 AM
[Y]ou're assuming there's a divide between what the game is supposed to be about, and what the characters are doing, when in truth the game is supposed to be about what the characters are doing...

[I]n RPGs, the default is that whatever the players choose to do with their characters and consequences of that are the plot. The entirety of it.
I'm just about done making all the points I've got in this debate (until someone raises something I just have to respond to. :smallamused:) But I'd like to highlight and emphasize this.

The GM does not decide what the game is about; the players do. The GM offers possibilities, adventure leads with planned adventures prepared and waiting, which the players will probably accept, but may not. If they decide that their characters spend some of their time on sex then that is part of what the game is about, by gaming's very nature. So, the GM responds to that part of the game as he/she would to whatever else the players decide is part of it.

(In the same group as the infertile bard, out party spends a wierd amount of time on what we order to eat in tavers and restaurants. We laugh at ourselves for it, yet we can't keep ourselves from doing it, so the GM has to be unusually creative and detailed about the menus.)

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-20, 10:05 AM
Oh, the GM absolutely does influence what the game is about, because the GM is a player too. But the GM also has a role as the referee, so when something he wants is in conflict with other players, he has to at least give them a chance. Hence, dice.

To twist brains of people in this thread, let's take a game like Noitahovi. In it, players can dictate how the game proceeds as long as they're in agreement of what should happen. Dice only get involved when the desires of two or more players are in conflict. Typically, the GM is the one who serves as a referee for such, but as the rules are written, you don't actually need a GM.

So what if two players agree for their characters to have sex, but don't agree on the consequences? They follow the rules for conflicts and use dice and abstract resources to decide whose vision takes precedence, or whether it's a draw, where neither or both versions could happen. In this sense, while Noitahovi is otherwise more like modern story games and less like D&D, it's actually harkens back to referee-less wargames and boardgames. While conflicts are framed as being all about the story they serve and create, at the same time, it's about whose playing piece wins when both plausibly could.

So is the other player automatically out to get you when they disagree with you and invoke the conflict rules?

Solaris
2015-02-20, 11:03 AM
Why WOULDN'T there be consequences?

Why should there be consequences? What does an STD or pregnancy contribute to the game?

Broken Twin
2015-02-20, 11:14 AM
When sex does come up in our games, it's usually humorous. We tend to use fade to black for the most part.

I usually run SW at the moment, so whenever they do want to roll for it, I tend to just go with the following:

Roll 2D6, take the higher.
4 or higher is an enjoyable time.
1 on either dice is a complication (STI, pregnancy, jealous boyfriend comes home, whatever fits best for the story)

VincentTakeda
2015-02-20, 11:18 AM
Scrhoedinger's STI seems to be the natural and expectable consequence of fiddling with Pandora's Box.

Ba dump tiss.

And to the idea of 'maybe its better to simply presume the players were wise and prudent in their carnal pursuits', I'd say their wisdom and prudence in other areas of the game sort of set the precedent more than my personal opinions do... I'm all about consistancy.

BWR
2015-02-20, 12:06 PM
Why should there be consequences? What does an STD or pregnancy contribute to the game?

You can ask that question about anything in the game.

Joe the Rat
2015-02-20, 12:10 PM
When sex does come up in our games, it's usually humorous. We tend to use fade to black for the most part.

I usually run SW at the moment, so whenever they do want to roll for it, I tend to just go with the following:

Roll 2D6, take the higher.
4 or higher is an enjoyable time.
1 on either dice is a complication (STI, pregnancy, jealous boyfriend comes home, whatever fits best for the story)
So what happens if they ace it? :smallbiggrin:

johnbragg
2015-02-20, 12:15 PM
So what happens if they ace it? :smallbiggrin:

("It" being the 2d6 nookie roll)

Morale bonuses, of course!

Broken Twin
2015-02-20, 01:14 PM
Haha, that's usually situation dependent. Most of the time it just means that both/all of the participants are very satisfied. If the PC is sleeping with the NPC for a favor or information, then they learn or get a bit more than they otherwise would have.

Nice thing is, Acing doesn't prevent complications. So it's very possible for them to have an awesome night, get a bonus out of it, and still have a complication come up.

Another thing to note is, this only comes up with PC/NPC relations. The results of NPC/NPC is entirely dictated by me on the odd chance it does occur and is relevant, and PC/PC is entirely within the player's control.

Coidzor
2015-02-20, 02:08 PM
Why WOULDN'T there be consequences?

Because, as has been covered in this thread, there is a certain amount of "we're handwaving this the same way I'm not covering how and where you're defecating, how you're purifying your water, whether you're drinking safe water, if your characters are eating, sleeping, or voiding their bowels at all, unless it becomes important and then I, as the DM, talk to you, the players, about it."

So if the DM doesn't talk to the players about it, but instead just springs *rolling* "You have the clap now." It's considered a bit rude, because there's the perception that the DM should have made this clear, the same way a DM should make it clear when they're using houserules, which, coincidentally, in most systems, having to roll for pregnancy and STDs are optional third party rules that have been adopted (which the players should be informed of as per usual) or houserules the DM has slapped together, which, again, they need to know about going into the game as players.


You can ask that question about anything in the game.

:smallconfused: And, unlike pregnancy, apparently, they mostly all have ready answers. :smalltongue:

Treasure/loot is a reward. Mechanics are tools to achieve a desired result in various scenarios. Fluff is to help with player and GM immersion and understanding of what they're on about. Experience is a score counter that unlocks tiers of play in leveled systems. Death is a punishment for not playing right(or, in Paranoia, a reward for playing interestingly if the death is interesting or a punishment for being boring if the death is boring).

Pregnancy when the group isn't down into having a joke campaign about the unfitness of adventuerers as parents is... a punishment for having a character interested in more things than murderhoboing and also a springing of surprise "Gotcha!" rules on players they weren't informed of before the start of play, because otherwise they'd be a consequence of interacting with rules the players were aware of from the start or at least from as soon as they announced an intent to tangle with the sex rules the GM in question was using.

It's either taking a character out of the game for reasons unrelated to the focus of the game that can't be removed without going into territory that even people fine with murderhoboing aren't going to be comfortable with, necessarily, because Abortion is kind of a hot-button cultural issue, or to stack increasingly dunderheaded notions of what pregnancy's debilitating effects are to progressively gimp a character that keeps adventuring. Or it's something everyone's on board with and it's a plot coupon, possibly with a timeskip. But if everyone's on board with it, the GM doesn't have to play Gotcha, now do they? :smalltongue:


Scrhoedinger's STI seems to be the natural and expectable consequence of fiddling with Pandora's Box.

Ba dump tiss.

And to the idea of 'maybe its better to simply presume the players were wise and prudent in their carnal pursuits', I'd say their wisdom and prudence in other areas of the game sort of set the precedent more than my personal opinions do... I'm all about consistancy.

Then just make it clear that you're acting the misanthrope about sex from the get-go, whether or not you want to mention your personal traumas about people not using contraception in meatspace, and have open GM-Player relations. It's not that hard to give them a disclaimer that they have to take precautions because you're houseruling pregnancy rules into the game. Or to direct them towards the rules that are part of the game which should detail the system's approach to sex and pregnancy so they can just read the darn rules for themselves. :smalltongue:


Oh, the GM absolutely does influence what the game is about, because the GM is a player too. But the GM also has a role as the referee, so when something he wants is in conflict with other players, he has to at least give them a chance. Hence, dice.

To twist brains of people in this thread, let's take a game like Noitahovi. In it, players can dictate how the game proceeds as long as they're in agreement of what should happen. Dice only get involved when the desires of two or more players are in conflict. Typically, the GM is the one who serves as a referee for such, but as the rules are written, you don't actually need a GM.

So what if two players agree for their characters to have sex, but don't agree on the consequences? They follow the rules for conflicts and use dice and abstract resources to decide whose vision takes precedence, or whether it's a draw, where neither or both versions could happen. In this sense, while Noitahovi is otherwise more like modern story games and less like D&D, it's actually harkens back to referee-less wargames and boardgames. While conflicts are framed as being all about the story they serve and create, at the same time, it's about whose playing piece wins when both plausibly could.

So is the other player automatically out to get you when they disagree with you and invoke the conflict rules?

Well, you've just provided us a nice parallel to when one partner in a romantic couple wants kids and the other doesn't and so the first partner tries to force the other partner into a pregnancy by sabotaging their contraception. Which is pretty damned skeevy. :smalltongue:

So, yeah, when one player tries to force the other player into having their character decommissioned when previously that other player had been an ally of the first player, that's probably a bit of an interpersonal betrayal that suggests there's something up, because if they were that good at working together that they decided their characters should get romantically involved in the first place, why the sudden disagreement as to whether one's character should give another an STD or get them pregnant? That's just fishy.

Plus, y'know, it's still unseemly for one player to just enforce his or her view of how every other player's characters should be because they are better at rolling dice, you have to have limits above and beyond the rules as far as how people interact with one another at the table.

jqavins
2015-02-20, 02:46 PM
GM: "It's a beautiful day. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and there are just a few puffy white clouds."

Player: "Nice. I'm just going to look at the sun for a couple or five minutes."

GM: "OK. When you turn away, you find you can't see. The healer says you'll most likely get some or most of your sight back in a few days, but there's probably some permanent damage. Roll - gee, it's not covered in the rules, let me see - nothing permanent on a 20, minor imparement on 11 - 19, major imparement on 2 - 10, and total blindness on a 1."

Player: "What? You never said I could go blind!"

GM: "You spent maybe five minutes staring into the sun. I shouldn't have to tell you that's what happens."

Player: "Yeah, in the real world. But you should have told me it could in this game world. Y'know, handwaving! Or you should have made it clear that you're acting the occulophobe from the git-go!"


It's Just A Game!

The Insanity
2015-02-21, 05:35 AM
Why should there be consequences? What does an STD or pregnancy contribute to the game?
This little thing called ROLEPLAYING. I'm sure you heard of it.

PersonMan
2015-02-21, 05:53 AM
GM: "It's a beautiful day. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and there are just a few puffy white clouds."

Player: "Nice. I'm just going to look at the sun for a couple or five minutes."

GM: "OK. When you turn away, you find you can't see. The healer says you'll most likely get some or most of your sight back in a few days, but there's probably some permanent damage. Roll - gee, it's not covered in the rules, let me see - nothing permanent on a 20, minor imparement on 11 - 19, major imparement on 2 - 10, and total blindness on a 1."

Player: "What? You never said I could go blind!"

GM: "You spent maybe five minutes staring into the sun. I shouldn't have to tell you that's what happens."

Player: "Yeah, in the real world. But you should have told me it could in this game world. Y'know, handwaving! Or you should have made it clear that you're acting the occulophobe from the git-go!"


It's Just A Game!

EDIT: Upon rereading this, I just realized that even in your example there's the same thing happening. 'Look at the sun' and 'stare into it' aren't the same - if I look at something too bright to stare directly into, I'd assume I was doing the whole 'squint, look near it, maybe cover it' thing, rather than just ignoring the searing pain in my eyes.

However, thischaracter now has a GM-given immunity to pain, which is always nice, and in a setting with magical healing they may be able to get out unscathed, so it may be profitable for a PC to stare into the sun and then bring it back up whenever pain is causing them trouble. :smalltongue:

I would say the following is more accurate to the current discussion:

GM: "It's a beautiful day. The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and there are just a few puffy white clouds."

Player: "Wonderful! I look up at the sky and appreciate the beauty of the weather."

GM: "OK. When you turn away, you find you can't see. The healer says you'll most likely get some or most of your sight back in a few days, but there's probably some permanent damage. Roll - gee, it's not covered in the rules, let me see - nothing permanent on a 20, minor imparement on 11 - 19, major imparement on 2 - 10, and total blindness on a 1."

Player: "What? You never said I could go blind!"

GM: "You spent maybe five minutes staring into the sun. I shouldn't have to tell you that's what happens."

Player: "I didn't! I said I look at the sky!"

GM: "Yes, and the sun is in the sky! If you wanted to not look at the sun, you should say so!"

Player: "Why would I need to?!"

Obviously, it's incredibly silly in this case, but the point is that a lot of the issues will come from one side assuming that A - consequences of sex are in the same realm as infected wounds (i.e. not covered; only works with some games, so just replace 'infected wounds' with something similar if you play systems that do cover infected wounds, etc.) or B - the PC is assumed to take precautions, similarly to how they are assumed to clean/repair equipment, look around while moving in potentially dangerous areas, and try to not get stabbed while fighting without the player stating it every time they enter combat. Obviously, someone who expects the player to state 'my PC [uses contraception and protection]' will understand 'My PC is doing risky things! I want risks and potential consequences!' while someone who doesn't think that's necessary hears the DM saying 'Ha-ha! I will randomly give you a disease!'.

BWR
2015-02-21, 06:36 AM
:smallconfused: And, unlike pregnancy, apparently, they mostly all have ready answers. :smalltongue:


I see it more akin to "why are all these guards attacking me when I just started stealing the king's silver in front of him?": in most games the king is going to react poorly to people stealing from him.
There are plenty of actions that have reasonable in game and real world results and I don't see anyone complaining about those here. In general, most beings procreate by sexual intercourse in the game so engaging in it has expected results in game. As all the reasonable people here have already pointed out, it's a matter of expectations for the games, but as a default you can't complain if your actions have consequences.

johnbragg
2015-02-21, 07:43 AM
I see it more akin to "why are all these guards attacking me when I just started stealing the king's silver in front of him?": in most games the king is going to react poorly to people stealing from him.
There are plenty of actions that have reasonable in game and real world results and I don't see anyone complaining about those here.

Well, in a game that usually boils down to PCs killing people and/or taking their stuff, the PCs generally are well-equipped to deal with the consequences of them killing people and/or taking their stuff. The player may not be pleased that the guards are attacking, but the guards are more-often-than-not walking bags of XP which to the murderhoboing player exist either to be murdered and looted or to fill in the spaces in the game between murdering and looting. Or the player has to roll up a new PC, or figure out how to get his now-loot-less PC out of prison.

The PCs are not so well equipped to deal with a pregnancy. (An STI is curable with a third-level spell in D&D). I haven't checked the Book of Erotic Fantasy, but I"d be surprised if there are rules there for an abortion, which is a question and a debate which is fully capable of ruining dinners, never mind games of social interaction often played by people with subpar social skills.

From another angle, robbing the kings valuables while the guards are standing there is generally not something the PCs are Supposed To Do. You're putting sex in the same category. That's a judgement and a choice, not an immutable fact.


In general, most beings procreate by sexual intercourse in the game so engaging in it has expected results in game. As all the reasonable people here have already pointed out, it's a matter of expectations for the games, but as a default you can't complain if your actions have consequences.

The real answer is for the GM to pull out the tried-and-true tool "Are you sure?" and let the player know what his character knows about the likely consequences of his actions.

The snarky answer is, handwaving away possible consequences of sex is destroying the REALISM of my magic elfgames!

I could see rolling for STIs for PCs who go out wenching with nameless NPCs, especially in a magic world where hangovers and STIs are trivial inconveniences. But PCs who sex PCs, or who sex important NPCs, to have to make a roll like that punishes roleplaying.

Handwaving away the possible downsides of sex is common in most forms of popular entertainment, in the same category of suspension-of-disbelief as George Costanza bedding around 50 women in 10 years.

BWR
2015-02-21, 09:38 AM
Well, in a game that usually boils down to PCs killing people and/or taking their stuff, the PCs generally are well-equipped to deal with the consequences of them killing people and/or taking their stuff. The player may not be pleased that the guards are attacking, but the guards are more-often-than-not walking bags of XP which to the murderhoboing player exist either to be murdered and looted or to fill in the spaces in the game between murdering and looting. Or the player has to roll up a new PC, or figure out how to get his now-loot-less PC out of prison.


Oi...You miss the bit about making sure all players are on the same page? Not everyone plays the game as nothing but murderhoboing. Those who wish to are welcome to do so. Some of us like some sort of sensible reactions to PC actions. If one group wants to hand-wave any consequences for sex, fine, but I don't see that this is somehow a better position than having consequences for your actions.


The PCs are not so well equipped to deal with a pregnancy. (An STI is curable with a third-level spell in D&D). I haven't checked the Book of Erotic Fantasy, but I"d be surprised if there are rules there for an abortion, which is a question and a debate which is fully capable of ruining dinners, never mind games of social interaction often played by people with subpar social skills..

PCs are often very well equipped to handle pregnancy, considering how rich they usually are by the standards of the worlds. As for 'people with suboptimal social skills' this has never been a problem in my experience. Even the geekiest and whiniest of us never seemed to have trouble actually knowing where babies come from or having characters suffer consequences for whatever actions they take.


From another angle, robbing the kings valuables while the guards are standing there is generally not something the PCs are Supposed To Do. You're putting sex in the same category. That's a judgement and a choice, not an immutable fact.
Um, what? Where the hell did you get the idea that I said anything about sex being stuff PCs are Not Supposed To Do? I merely said that if you take actions you should expect consequences unless certain things are specifically addressed. Would you assume people shouldn't take damage for falling off a cliff if there weren't rules for falling damage? Would you assume that people wouldn't need to eat if there weren't starvation rules? Actions have consequences and that is the basis of roleplaying.


The real answer is for the GM to pull out the tried-and-true tool "Are you sure?" and let the player know what his character knows about the likely consequences of his actions.

So, basically you agree with us that groups should be on the same page when it comes to games?. We just run on the assumption (that I feel is quite reasonable) that unless something is specifically stated as being different from the real world, real world rules apply.


I could see rolling for STIs for PCs who go out wenching with nameless NPCs, especially in a magic world where hangovers and STIs are trivial inconveniences. But PCs who sex PCs, or who sex important NPCs, to have to make a roll like that punishes roleplaying.
You see punishment, I see opportunities. I've done this to PCs. It's a complication, things need to be done differently than they could be done before getting kids but you know what? It adds to the game - at least our games. It increases roleplaying. People have to actually roleplay their responses to becoming parents, how they handle this disruption to their lives. It is PC actions and consequences of these actions; isn't this the very basis of roleplaying?
If some people want to go all James Bond with their sex life, let it be known beforehand and see if the GM agrees.


Handwaving away the possible downsides of sex is common in most forms of popular entertainment, in the same category of suspension-of-disbelief as George Costanza bedding around 50 women in 10 years.
If you want that, agree with your group about that before it becomes an issue. I still don't see that complaining about those of us who include consequences for sex are doing it wrong. I don't get the reference.

Solaris
2015-02-21, 09:46 AM
This little thing called ROLEPLAYING. I'm sure you heard of it.

Oh yes, I've heard of... ROLEPLAYING.

I'm sure you ROLEPLAY your characters defecating and urinating, too, because that's ROLEPLAYING and it contributes so much to the game. Be sure to impose penalties on social skills for spending several days in a dungeon and not being able to scrub up properly, because that's ROLEPLAYING too and it's vital to everyone's enjoyment of the game.

Oh, wait. No it doesn't. Not really. Pregnancy can add to drama or comedy depending on the characters involved and how it's handled, and an STD can create a comedic situation that's funny once, but by and large they're really wasting everyone else's time and are just there to punish someone for violating Puritanical morals if they come up more than 4-5% of the time (if we're going for realism) or practically not at all (if we're going for what best contributes to everyone's enjoyment of the game). A pregnancy is very likely to completely take the character out of the game if roleplayed realistically, and an STD is either simply not going to make it past their Fort save or it's going to cost them money for roleplaying. My time is not infinite; I would not appreciate the DM taking it up to inflict punishments on other people's characters who spend their off-time boozing and wenching simply because ROLEPLAYING. Every minute spent faffing around with that sort of thing is a minute that could be better spent doing almost literally anything else, to include actual roleplaying. As a DM, I would no more try to punish someone for roleplaying a character as something other than a paranoid murderhobo than I would inflict penalties on their Diplomacy checks because they forgot to buy soap. It's just easier to assume their character isn't a moron and is using some method of protection and move on with the game than to ROLEPLAY inflicting punishments on them because ROLEPLAYING.

johnbragg
2015-02-21, 10:23 AM
Oi...You miss the bit about making sure all players are on the same page? Not everyone plays the game as nothing but murderhoboing. Those who wish to are welcome to do so. Some of us like some sort of sensible reactions to PC actions. If one group wants to hand-wave any consequences for sex, fine, but I don't see that this is somehow a better position than having consequences for your actions.

The example was in response to the example of PCs robbing the king's treasures and being surprised that the guards react. That's pretty much a classic murderhobo move.

It's a "better position", IMO, because it encourages facets of the game that the rules-designers have had a hard time encouraging and supporting. The hero seducing an important NPC is a classic trope, but the classes designed for it either have required serious splatbook support (the DFI bard) or are regarded as hopeless (swashbuckler). That doesn't say a fighter or a cleric or a wizard or a rogue couldn't, much less a high-Charisma sorcerer, but the classes are designed in other directions. (YEs, this is the general roleplaying forum, but D&D is the default standard).

So I'd say it's a pretty big "screw you" to the hapless player who's trying to Errol Flynn with his Tier 4 or 5 character, who finally gets a Moment of Awesome--and then has to roll to see if he (or she) gets the magic clap.

Or for the player of a female PC, who puts in the effort of roleplaying a courtship with a "good match" of an NPC husband, or a PC-PC romance, who gets all the fun of having their character out of commission for at least 3-4 months of game-world time.


PCs are often very well equipped to handle pregnancy, considering how rich they usually are by the standards of the worlds.

Have you known any pregnant women?


As for 'people with suboptimal social skills' this has never been a problem in my experience. Even the geekiest and whiniest of us never seemed to have trouble actually knowing where babies come from or having characters suffer consequences for whatever actions they take.

So at your gaming table people of different opinions can civilly and sensibly discuss the morality of abortion in the game world?


Um, what? Where the hell did you get the idea that I said anything about sex being stuff PCs are Not Supposed To Do?

Things with mechanical penalties are things that characters try to avoid. It is entirely within your discretion as DM whether there are possible game-mechanical penalties for having sex. In choosing to assess those penalties, or roll for those penalties, you are punishing the PC for having sex.


I merely said that if you take actions you should expect consequences unless certain things are specifically addressed. Would you assume people shouldn't take damage for falling off a cliff if there weren't rules for falling damage?

Poor analogy. We're talking about PCs having sex, which is presumably voluntary. PCs should take damage for _jumping_ off a cliff--that is an example of something you're Not Supposed To Do.


Would you assume that people wouldn't need to eat if there weren't starvation rules? Actions have consequences and that is the basis of roleplaying.

Good lord, does your group roleplay mealtime? Do your characters roll for scurvy if they don't finish their broccoli and take Spot check penalties for not eating their carrots? Take strength penalties if they don't finish their protein?

Then go ahead and handwave that in a high-fantasy setting, prophylatics are a thing that is presumed to be addressed "off camera."


So, basically you agree with us that groups should be on the same page when it comes to games?.

Yes, I believe everyone agrees on that.


We just run on the assumption (that I feel is quite reasonable) that unless something is specifically stated as being different from the real world, real world rules apply.

I find that assumption, and your application of it, to be a flawed standard. Real world rules apply, but common sense should determine what is and is not addressed in game, with an eye on what makes a better roleplaying experience.


You see punishment, I see opportunities. I've done this to PCs. It's a complication, things need to be done differently than they could be done before getting kids but you know what? It adds to the game - at least our games. It increases roleplaying. People have to actually roleplay their responses to becoming parents, how they handle this disruption to their lives. It is PC actions and consequences of these actions; isn't this the very basis of roleplaying?

You've hit your players--presumably one of your players, even if the PC was a father--with an unplanned pregnancy? Sweet Jeebus, I'm in the "Worst DM You've Ever Had Thread."

What did the expectant mother's player do during the sessions when her character was out of commission?

Or was the pregnancy planned? Did the campaign just time-shift a year or so, or what?

DigoDragon
2015-02-21, 11:40 AM
So what happens if they ace it? :smallbiggrin:

I remember once in a D&D game I ran, the team ranger and favored soul got it on in a private room after both got stupidly drunk. The favored soul was like "Let's roll to see how much fun we have!" and she got a natural 20. The ranger by contrast rolled a 3. Then the cleric and archer both rolled 4d6 'Fatigue damage due to the noise overnight in the room next door' damage and they all roleplayed the morning after respectively, with the favored soul having a huge grin the entire morning, the archer and cleric sharing a mug of coffee laced with Advil, and the ranger having no memory of the past 12 hours.

As DM I had this 'deer in headlights' thing for a solid 10 minutes... And then awarded everyone 500 xp each for Roleplaying.

goto124
2015-02-21, 11:56 AM
Request to turn this thread into 'Funny Sex- or Romance- related Moments in your Campaign'.

I wish I had some to share.

johnbragg
2015-02-21, 12:42 PM
You've hit your players--presumably one of your players, even if the PC was a father--with an unplanned pregnancy? Sweet Jeebus, I'm in the "Worst DM You've Ever Had Thread."

What did the expectant mother's player do during the sessions when her character was out of commission?

Or was the pregnancy planned? Did the campaign just time-shift a year or so, or what?

I'm done shoveling snow for a while, and I'd like to know what actually happened in the campaign. I was really harsh, and I'd like to apologize for that.

Coidzor
2015-02-21, 02:23 PM
I see it more akin to "why are all these guards attacking me when I just started stealing the king's silver in front of him?": in most games the king is going to react poorly to people stealing from him.

So you're punishing the players for doing something you don't want them to do in game?

Though, you're also using rules they're already familiar with to interact with them in the one form of punishment as opposed to the surprise unknown rules about STDs and pregnancy. Or punishing them for not using the contraception that didn't actually exist until you decided that it existed but you were keeping it a secret from them.


There are plenty of actions that have reasonable in game and real world results and I don't see anyone complaining about those here. In general, most beings procreate by sexual intercourse in the game so engaging in it has expected results in game. As all the reasonable people here have already pointed out, it's a matter of expectations for the games, but as a default you can't complain if your actions have consequences.

You can definitely criticize someone for springing rules on you and playing Gotcha as a viable GMing tactic in games which aren't already predicated on a version of Mao.

Edit:
Oi...You miss the bit about making sure all players are on the same page?

I admit that yes, I did miss you saying that. Where was that again? :smallconfused: I just went back through the thread looking for your contributions to this tangent and I haven't found any sort of statement along those lines.

I have, however, found The Insanity and jqavins saying that it's the player's fault if they don't know how the GM is going to run with it in the first place, despite the fact that for the players to know how the GM is going to run something, the GM has to communicate with them, otherwise it's, y'know, assuming that players are mind-readers. :smallconfused:

But, sure, if they're all on the same page in the first place then statements about springing secret houserules out of the blue on people are irrelevant and if that's all that this tangent is about, then it's a rather pointless tangent and you should've said so sooner. :smalltongue:

Rereading the posts of others on the subject, I'm having a hard time believing that everyone's on the same page in the hypotheticals and generalities that have been brought up.

Edit2: The closest I've found is this statement I agree with from Digodragon in response to Sajiri saying that the group should say what they're going with from the get-go, or at least before starting to include sex in the game.


Yeah, it really just comes down to communication before the game begins so that everyone is aware.

Broken Twin
2015-02-21, 02:47 PM
The only complication from sex that I would never inflict on a PC is pregnancy, if they were playing a female. Not without the player's permission, anyway. NPCs becoming pregnant with the PC's children is a great plot device. In one game I ran, a player was playing a horndog bard. By the end of the campaign, he had two illegitimate children, one via a lady whose merchant father was now after his head, another via a barmaid of whom he visited on occasion, and a street urchin he adopted that traveled with the group. It's one of my players' favorite games. I honestly do not think they would have enjoyed it as much without the complications that arose from their characters having sex.

The complications aren't a punishment against the player. They're a development along the path that the players chose to engage in. If the players want to bring sex into the game, then I'm going to do what I do with everything they want to bring in, and make it part of the narrative.

TechnOkami
2015-02-21, 02:57 PM
I would imagine Oglaf would be a good source of inspiration for funny-sex related ideas, plot hooks, items, etc.

jqavins
2015-02-21, 03:57 PM
just there to punish someone for violating Puritanical morals...

I would not appreciate the DM taking it up to inflict punishments on other people's characters...

As a DM, I would no more try to punish someone for roleplaying...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Whether pregnancy and STDs fit in the sort of game your group wants or not, to call it "punishment" is reading something into the GMs action that, is most cases at least, just not there.

Yes, toilet etc. is ignored because, usually, it is trivial. Sex isn't trivial. And when I come into town and go into a tavern extraordinarily dirty - perhaps I escaped the BBEG's trap by swimming across the cesspool and haven't taken the time to wash - as a player I expect to take, at the very least, a big penalty on social skills because, at that point, my hygene is not trivial either. (Actually, I'd expect to be refused service in any establishment in which I would care to be served.)

HardcoreD&Dgirl
2015-02-21, 04:11 PM
EDIT: It's similar to another problem. The DM lines a path with lots of warning signs saying 'death befalls those who walk this way'. Unfortunately, in previous games the player was in, those 'warning signs' mean nothing but point out the way to kill the BBEG. So the player follows the signs... and dies. And wonders what happened and why things turned out that way. I could link to the thread if I could find it...

I used to play a deadlands game, and we had a player who came in late every week (his work schedule made him miss) when he wasn't with us (because the DM didn't always bring him along) he would ask a local what the dumbest place we could have gone to... for over a year this worked and he caught up to us... then one week the DM was in a bad mood and the NPC sent him to a place full of harrowed (badass undead) and got him killed... the PC was pissed, and it ended up breaking up the group...

jqavins
2015-02-21, 05:41 PM
I used to play a deadlands game, and we had a player who came in late every week (his work schedule made him miss) when he wasn't with us (because the DM didn't always bring him along) he would ask a local what the dumbest place we could have gone to... for over a year this worked and he caught up to us... then one week the DM was in a bad mood and the NPC sent him to a place full of harrowed (badass undead) and got him killed... the PC was pissed, and it ended up breaking up the group...
OK, now that seems punative (for being chronically late) and was definitely unfair and inappropriate (taking his bad mood out on the PC and his player.) The unfair, inappropriate, and stupid thing was setting up a reasonable expectation and then going back on it. The most important basis for this whole disgreement is whether or not ignoring the possibility of pregnency and STDs is a reasonable expectation.

Another point of argument is why I wrote "seems punative." Whether an act is punishment (for whatever) or not is a matter not of what is done but of why it is done. Even if it would be ffective if the GM wanted to punish (as this would) it's a mistake to assume that punishment was the intent. In this case, it's a reasonable conclusion that it probably was. In the case of a GM imposing a pregnency and/or STD roll, even if it is unexpected, there's simply no reason to assume punitive intent.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
-- Unknown

Solaris
2015-02-21, 05:56 PM
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Whether pregnancy and STDs fit in the sort of game your group wants or not, to call it "punishment" is reading something into the GMs action that, is most cases at least, just not there.

Really? You're going to pull that one? You're going to insult my intelligence and overuse a movie quote in a vain effort at making yourself seem clever?


Full Definition of PUNISHMENT
1 : the act of punishing (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/punishing)
2
a : suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution
b : a penalty inflicted on an offender through judicial procedure
3 : severe, rough, or disastrous treatment

I know exactly what it means. It means you're going to tax the players their gold to have a disease removed, or impose roleplaying punishments on them for dealing with the children... all because they made the mistake of trying to roleplay something other than a power-mad murderhobo.

Worse yet, there is nothing in the PHB, DMG, or MM about characters getting pregnant, getting another character pregnant, or transmitting STDs. While it may be 'realistic' to get them involved, it's DM fiat invented with the specific intent of punishing a player. They may think they have other intentions, but in every instance inflicting an STD on a character is a punishment, and only in every instance is inflicting an unwanted pregnancy on a female character a punishment. The only ones who might get away with no consequences from a pregnancy are male seducers who leave behind a trail of bastards, and that presupposes none of his 'conquests' have the ability to track him down. I might take away my player characters' gold because forcing them to pay a 50% tax for entering the capital city is 'realistic' and 'good' setting-building, but really what I'd be doing is punishing them for not playing murderhobos.

Feel free to explain to me your definition of 'punishment', because it does not fit the rest of the world's definition.


Yes, toilet etc. is ignored because, usually, it is trivial. Sex isn't trivial. And when I come into town and go into a tavern extraordinarily dirty - perhaps I escaped the BBEG's trap by swimming across the cesspool and haven't taken the time to wash - as a player I expect to take, at the very least, a big penalty on social skills because, at that point, my hygene is not trivial either. (Actually, I'd expect to be refused service in any establishment in which I would care to be served.)

Sex between two consenting adults is trivial. No, really, it is. In most games outside of erotica, the most treatment it would get is a fade-to-black.
The other games generally wind up in the 'Worst DMs' thread.
In the real world, it is equally trivial - especially with contraceptives and basic protective measures. The reason I brought up personal hygiene is because they are of like consequence; it's perfectly reasonable to assume and skip over the character employing basic protection without forcing them to play Inventories & Accountants every time they make the mistake of roleplaying a character a certain way.

Not even swimming through a cesspool, just simply not bathing in a few days would realistically hinder your social interactions. After about the week mark you get fantastically smelly, and medieval hygienic practices were not the 'dung age' unwashed masses stereotyped in media. There's nothing in the books about those, either, because nobody's game gets improved by being told they can't interact with someone on account of smelling like the south end of a north-bound mule.

I don't see too many DMs coming up with diseases from drinking water in the wilds, and that's pretty realistic, too. You're more likely to catch typhoid, polio, or dysentery from drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated food than you are to catch gonnoherpasyphilaids from getting lucky with the local barmaid, but I don't see too many people advocating for that, either. You can assume anything you like, but I'm only acting on presented evidence.

Inflicting sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies on characters is punishing them through DM fiat outside of any game that does not involve the BoEF.

Coidzor
2015-02-21, 06:37 PM
I would imagine Oglaf would be a good source of inspiration for funny-sex related ideas, plot hooks, items, etc.

Oh yeah. :smallbiggrin:

There's a lot of sexual comedy that can happen, though most of it does require being upfront about having a sexual comedy themed campaign. Granted, putting Bride of Portable Hole Full of Beer, Nymphology, Bastards and Bloodlines, Book of Erotic Fantasy, and that other book about Blue Magic that's often lumped in with Nymphology and BOEF, well, that's a clue that the campaign is a comedic one that's probably going to be a sex-filled or even sex-fuelled romp through D&D Land.

Obak
2015-02-21, 06:41 PM
*sigh*
Std? Cure disease

Unwanted pregnancy?
Finger of death

Problem solved!

jqavins
2015-02-21, 06:55 PM
Really? You're going to pull that one? You're going to insult my intelligence and overuse a movie quote in a vain effort at making yourself seem clever?
No, for the purpose of comparing your frquent and inappropriate use of "punishment" to Vizini's frequent and inappropriate use of "inconceivable." The comparrison is imperfect, since Vizini was obviously wrong, and you are only mostly wrong. (I couldn't resist.)


I know exactly what it means. It means you're going to tax the players their gold to have a disease removed, or impose roleplaying punishments on them for dealing with the children... all because they made the mistake of trying to roleplay something other than a power-mad murderhobo.
Your words here and your words previously do not jive. You give a good definition, including that punishment is retaliation for something, showing that you know what it means. Yet you persist in using it where retaliation is not in evidence, creating the appearance that you don't know, or at least enough of an appearance to warrant the quote. You also persist in concluding that any GM who imposes pregnancy and/or STD rolls must, therefore, be interested in running a game that contains nothing but murderhobos. This does not follow. I am at a loss as to why anyone would think it follows.


Worse yet, there is nothing in the PHB, DMG, or MM about characters getting pregnant, getting another character pregnant, or transmitting STDs.
Nor is there anything about eye damage if one chooses to stare into the sun, but a GM would be remiss in not considering it.


While it may be 'realistic' to get them involved, it's DM fiat invented with the specific intent of punishing a player. They may think they have other intentions, but in every instance inflicting an STD on a character is a punishment, and only in every instance is inflicting an unwanted pregnancy on a female character a punishment.
You must be the greatest psyhchic who's ever lived, to read the minds of countless people you've never met and never will.


Feel free to explain to me your definition of 'punishment', because it does not fit the rest of the world's definition.
No, it's the sme as the one you quoted but you don't seem to believe.


You can assume anything you like, but I'm only acting on presented evidence.
The presented evidence shows that peoplet hink more about sex. The conclusion that it is punative is based on imagined evidence.

Solaris
2015-02-21, 07:38 PM
Then I invite you to go read my post again (or this one, where I'm not using so many words), because you're missing the point contradicting your own.

You claim that because the DM doesn't intend it to be punitive, it's not a punishment. What the DM intends does not matter to anyone outside his head. What he does is what matters to the players. That's why I used the example of taxing characters' gold; I could have intended it add to the verisimilitude, but really it's just forcing them to pay gold for not killing the tax collectors. It doesn't have to have malevolent or vindictive intent, but it's still punishing characters for trivial actions and forcing the application of consequences the evasion of which are likewise trivial in reality with people who aren't superhumans.
That's what makes it punishment.

With the murderhobo thing, I'm exaggerating for effect. There are plenty of ways to play characters who are neither promiscuous nor murderhobos, but most any in-depth RP interactions between characters are probably going to involve sex in some way, shape, or form at some point along the line. A GM who establishes penalties for characters having sex is telling his players, whether he intends to or not, that he's not interested in their RP not directly related to the game's plot.

jqavins
2015-02-21, 08:50 PM
What the DM intends does not matter to anyone outside his head.
But it does make the difference between punishment and something else. That's what punishment means.


A GM who establishes penalties for characters having sex is telling his players, whether he intends to or not, that he's not interested in their RP not directly related to the game's plot.
What is "the plot?" Is "the plot" limited to the things that earn experience points or treasure? No, the plot is all those things that are happening in the game, including all the role playing. It's impossible for the players to deviate from the plot because whatever they do is the plot. And if the GM is paying enough attention to consider consequence rolls then he's clearly showing interest.

Tengu_temp
2015-02-21, 09:12 PM
Hey, folks! Have you ever wondered why RPGs are still a primarily male-dominated hobby, and RPG players have a reputation of being creepy neckbeards? Read this thread, realize that apparently "don't drop an unplanned pregnancy on your female PCs unless you know in advance the players are okay with it" is a controversial statement that evokes mixed reaction, instead of a single-voiced "well duh, the alternative is incredibly creepy", and wonder no more!

Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to rape PCs, without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand? Bonus points if you use realism as an excuse for doing that!

Solaris
2015-02-21, 09:42 PM
But it does make the difference between punishment and something else. That's what punishment means.

Then what is it, exactly, when you're accidentally punishing someone for doing something rather than deliberately punishing them? And what's the difference to the person being punished?


What is "the plot?" Is "the plot" limited to the things that earn experience points or treasure? No, the plot is all those things that are happening in the game, including all the role playing. It's impossible for the players to deviate from the plot because whatever they do is the plot. And if the GM is paying enough attention to consider consequence rolls then he's clearly showing interest.

My bad, I forgot to put the air quotes around the word "plot" or otherwise indicate my contempt for GMs who act that way - you're evidently familiar with my point, though, about how these games don't have a pre-written storyline like a movie or a book does.
As it turns out, I'm not quite perfect. Don't tell anyone, though.

But the other half of my point there is that doing things like penalizing players for interacting intimately with NPCs is going to encourage them to pare that idea of plot down to things that give experience points and drop loot when killed.

Vertharrad
2015-02-21, 09:53 PM
You know until Tengu decided to make a non-sensical reply to a conversation he apparently can't follow I was going to stay out of this thread. Let's look back to what Solaris and jqavins are talking about...sex and it's possible consequences. Solaris keeps using the word punishment and I don't think Solaris knows what punishment means. It's a corrective measure taken in response to a action that is wrong or inappropriate.

When 2 consenting people get together and have sexual intercourse there are considerations to be made, that sometimes don't get considered. STD's, pregnancy, payment in the case of prostitutes, and reactions from family and friends should they find out. These consequences are neither good or bad, they just are. Their not punishment...they are just possible outcomes. These outcomes have existed since the beginning of our civilization. DnD 3e has ways of protecting or eliminating the outcome if you don't want to try and protect yourself proactively.

This doesn't make the GM bad, evil, or creepy...unless they are actually forcing your character to have sex in which case I advise you leave that particular GM's group. If the game were to try and cover everything possible in life and make the rules non-optimizers heaven you'd be looking DnD Brittanica and a heavy cost to play the game. Designers and companies want to sell the game not have it take up space on a stores shelves and collect dust.



I think there is a place for Love and sex in the game...but only if the players and GM can deal with it responsibly, otherwise don't bring it up at all.

Tengu_temp
2015-02-21, 09:58 PM
You know until Tengu decided to make a non-sensical reply to a conversation he apparently can't follow I was going to stay out of this thread.

I'm not replying to the conversation. If I did, I'd quote something. I'm responding to the thread as a whole.

And you really don't think saddling a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy can be creepy and uncomfortable? You don't associate with many women, do you?

RPGuru1331
2015-02-21, 10:02 PM
I think my favorite part is that the people who want to assume consequences are the ones who apparently don't want to follow up on that. You have alchemical wonders that put real world medicine to shame, but apparently you can't imagine them having access to a literally magical contraception drug, or a magic device that functions similarly. People can fling fire from their fingertips, you want them to have to think about STIs, pregnancy and the like, but magical countermeasures are just a foreign thing nobody has thought of before the PCs. Because 'realism'. Yep. That sure is 'realistic'. I really hope you all roll for every mundane disease under the sun. I'd hate to think that suddenly mundane real world problems are primarily only relevant when women are involved.

Solaris
2015-02-21, 10:19 PM
You know until Tengu decided to make a non-sensical reply to a conversation he apparently can't follow I was going to stay out of this thread. Let's look back to what Solaris and jqavins are talking about...sex and it's possible consequences. Solaris keeps using the word punishment and I don't think Solaris knows what punishment means. It's a corrective measure taken in response to a action that is wrong or inappropriate.

When 2 consenting people get together and have sexual intercourse there are considerations to be made, that sometimes don't get considered. STD's, pregnancy, payment in the case of prostitutes, and reactions from family and friends should they find out. These consequences are neither good or bad, they just are. Their not punishment...they are just possible outcomes. These outcomes have existed since the beginning of our civilization. DnD 3e has ways of protecting or eliminating the outcome if you don't want to try and protect yourself proactively.

Show me where STDs and pregnancies are covered in the DMG, or eat your words.


I think my favorite part is that the people who want to assume consequences are the ones who apparently don't want to follow up on that. You have alchemical wonders that put real world medicine to shame, but apparently you can't imagine them having access to a literally magical contraception drug, or a magic device that functions similarly. People can fling fire from their fingertips, you want them to have to think about STIs, pregnancy and the like, but magical countermeasures are just a foreign thing nobody has thought of before the PCs. Because 'realism'. Yep. That sure is 'realistic'. I really hope you all roll for every mundane disease under the sun. I'd hate to think that suddenly mundane real world problems are primarily only relevant when women are involved.

Well, I'm sure they would... if it weren't for the opportunity to punish players for offending their notions of proper conduct.

Terraoblivion
2015-02-21, 10:36 PM
True, but this is a corner case where it shouldn't be necessary, as sex is a real-world thing and most people who'd think to involve it in a game are already aware of what it could lead to. It's the same as how you shouldn't really need a specific explanation for how falling down the stairs might hurt you, or how sticking your hand into a fire might burn you.

Sometimes it is necessary, though, but I'm not averse to doing a bit of sex ed on the side when a situation requires. :smallamused:

Do you also roll for whether drunk drivers hit you on the street or loose shingles falling from roofs?

wumpus
2015-02-21, 10:38 PM
You know until Tengu decided to make a non-sensical reply to a conversation he apparently can't follow I was going to stay out of this thread.

It seemed the only appropriate reply to the thread. In the 1e AD&D DMG, Gary Gygax included a monthly roll for contacting diseases. You had a reasonably good chance if you were trudging through swamps (something many players will do without thinking). I don't think it was common then and doubt it made it to 2e (I'm pretty sure it has never been seen again in D&D). Why are STDs different?

On a related note, I could easily see a "played by a guy*" PC getting pregnant. I'd assume that any other character would have some sort of protection pre-planned.

* in the sense of the common expression**. Not so much if a real attempt is made to role play.
** Isn't this enough to prove Tengu right?

Terraoblivion
2015-02-21, 10:41 PM
Really, why are people so caught up on the consequences of sex and not the dangers of improper hygiene? A lot more people died of dysentery, not to mention countless other diseases, from poor hygiene and improperly kept latrines than STIs, yet that is trivial while the dangers of sex are vitally important.

Solaris
2015-02-21, 10:54 PM
Hey, folks! Have you ever wondered why RPGs are still a primarily male-dominated hobby, and RPG players have a reputation of being creepy neckbeards? Read this thread, realize that apparently "don't drop an unplanned pregnancy on your female PCs unless you know in advance the players are okay with it" is a controversial statement that evokes mixed reaction, instead of a single-voiced "well duh, the alternative is incredibly creepy", and wonder no more!

Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to rape PCs, without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand? Bonus points if you use realism as an excuse for doing that!


And you really don't think saddling a female PC with an unwanted pregnancy can be creepy and uncomfortable? You don't associate with many women, do you?

My fiancee was reading this over my shoulder. She's female (I checked), and... suffice to say she agrees with this completely. She would actually be pissed if that happened to one of her characters.

goto124
2015-02-21, 10:59 PM
If I played a male PC and got a female NPC pregnant, I would be just as furious. It's not much better, and I'll be wondering since when pregnancy was a thing in the campaign.

Earlier on a poster said he pulled this off a few times and it went well. I guess it helps for the players to know each other well?

Tengu_temp
2015-02-21, 10:59 PM
Really, why are people so caught up on the consequences of sex and not the dangers of improper hygiene? A lot more people died of dysentery, not to mention countless other diseases, from poor hygiene and improperly kept latrines than STIs, yet that is trivial while the dangers of sex are vitally important.

Because "ha ha, you now have dysyntery" gives fewer opportunities for immature laughs than "ha ha, you now have herpes". Though I guess Oregon Trail would disagree.



On a related note, I could easily see a "played by a guy*" PC getting pregnant. I'd assume that any other character would have some sort of protection pre-planned.


That's still creepy and wrong if people didn't agree beforehand that they're comfortable with such things happening, yes. And really, why do you treat characters differently depending on whether their player is male or female?



Earlier on a poster said he pulled this off a few times and it went well. I guess it helps for the players to know each other well?

You see, it depends entirely if your group is comfortable with such things, or not. If they are, then go for it, unplanned pregnancies and STDs for everyone!
(Don't actually do that.)

The thing is, you can't assume by default that people are comfortable with that. If it happened in the game and nobody raised objections, then you either got lucky or someone was bothered by it but was too shy to speak up. The only way to make sure everyone is comfortable with such touchy subjects is to talk to them before the game starts, to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Coidzor
2015-02-21, 11:51 PM
But it does make the difference between punishment and something else. That's what punishment means.

You're letting semantics obfuscate the point. Also, it's not like the idea of negative actions being referred to as punishments when they're not actively setting out to retaliate against a given behavior or action is anything new.


What is "the plot?" Is "the plot" limited to the things that earn experience points or treasure? No, the plot is all those things that are happening in the game, including all the role playing. It's impossible for the players to deviate from the plot because whatever they do is the plot. And if the GM is paying enough attention to consider consequence rolls then he's clearly showing interest.

Derailing the plot from being about taking down the local Dark Lord and instead being about the misadventures of the Pregnant Barbarian with the followup sequel 3 Bugbears and a Baby is something that can happen in these situations, so there's not much point in denying it. :smallconfused:

Vertharrad
2015-02-22, 12:41 AM
Well it would seem everyone read all BUT the last part of my post...if you don't want to deal with it DONT INCLUDE IT. If you want to make sure you players and the GM is on the same page have the talk before the game begins. I could care less what your so's had to say about this discussion it doesn't change that you want to make the D/GM out to be a terrible referee that has it in for you, I'm sure that isn't it. So you can dispense with the talk of punishment or negative actions as if that was the intent...unless you know for sure it was because you were there. I wasn't and yes all but maybe a handful w/fingers left over of games I played dealt with such issues, and then only because we players included it and showed we were responsible enough to deal with it. It's not for everyone and it isn't even for all the time either...unless you want it to be. So quit getting furious at us because were being a little objective. I could care less if you included or didn't include love and sex in your games, but if you do get ready to deal with the issues of STD's pregnancy jelousy etc. You want to take the risk but you don't want to pay the piper should you lose...wrong attitude.

Solaris
2015-02-22, 12:52 AM
Well it would seem everyone read all BUT the last part of my post...if you don't want to deal with it DONT INCLUDE IT. If you want to make sure you players and the GM is on the same page have the talk before the game begins. I could care less what your so's had to say about this discussion it doesn't change that you want to make the D/GM out to be a terrible referee that has it in for you, I'm sure that isn't it. So you can dispense with the talk of punishment or negative actions as if that was the intent...unless you know for sure it was because you were there. I wasn't and yes all but maybe a handful w/fingers left over of games I played dealt with such issues, and then only because we players included it and showed we were responsible enough to deal with it. It's not for everyone and it isn't even for all the time either...unless you want it to be. So quit getting furious at us because were being a little objective. I could care less if you included or didn't include love and sex in your games, but if you do get ready to deal with the issues of STD's pregnancy jelousy etc. You want to take the risk but you don't want to pay the piper should you lose...wrong attitude.

So... no, you have no evidence to support your insult, think that intentions matter in the slightest for anyone outside of your head, and you don't know what 'objective' means either. I'm the one arguing for an objective view; you're arguing for a subjective view of STDs and pregnancies being inflicted on characters through DM fiat.
Because, by RAW, there is no such risk - and any 'realistic' interpretation of any setting would have less risk of STD and unwanted pregnancy than they would of typhoid, dysentery, polio, or malaria.
Roleplaying consequences for roleplaying actions are perfectly fine and are reasonable. That's why I didn't argue that point when you mentioned it earlier. Inflicting mechanical consequences for roleplaying actions, especially ones the GM has to make up, is not reasonable.

The fact that you think I'm "furious" (or anyone else) in this thread whilst arguing that we couldn't possibly know what the DM's motives are is just hypocrite icing on the irony cake.

Would you like your words medium-rare or well done?

SiuiS
2015-02-22, 03:01 AM
I greatly prefer that to be the focus of the campaign, rather than something that only accidentally steals the BBEG's thunder

I think it makes an interesting sideplot in the games it comes up in, but then, I also get tired of there being a big bad evil guy. The world does not have to have one dude who has some sort of rules-bending Master plot no player could ever execute a tenth as well which is conveniently pointed at the party to give them an advancement treadmill for.

I like sandboxes. I like games where there is a world and if some ass hat is ruining county Orko then I can just leave, sail to a different continent and be a manticore saleswoman. I like games where plots happen because the PCs are people with petty needs and motivations outside of hoboing muderously. The games I prefer don't suffer because of a novel introduction of pregnancy. But then, not every game I'm in is a game I would prefer, as they say.



There are rather few things more female or feminine for mammals than gestating an embryonic life form inside their womb or laying fertilized eggs wherever platypi and echidnas lay their eggs.

Sure. Now tell me how sex and romance are feminine traits, cuz those are the weird ones.


Pregancy is not a crime, does not have a victim (even though it has an effected person) and is the result of a two person act so is both people's fault should one want to assign fault at all.

What you are missing is the inherent malice in "sorry, dragons can fly, wizards can shoot fire, the periodic table has four elements plus a hotly debated fifth "Aether" element, and there's all sorts of magic and hand-waving of realism, but I am going to keep throwing petty hurdles at you that keep you from playing in dungeons and fightig with dragons because realism".

Why doesn't the barbarian have the runs from all that alcoholism? Why doesn't he get the shakes when we're two days in the wild and he's not had his daily gallon? Why isn't the dwarf taking penalties for eating all that garbage on a dare but somehow 'morning sickness' makes me useless? Why can the Druid live on literal swamp water and caught rats without indigestion but I have to worry about bloating?

Same goes for disease. Fighter can dice in a filthy, live ridden warren with other folks who haven bathed this season, who squat in their own feces and have no idea how hygiene works, who squeeze through muck and past rats to get to their secret gambling dens, and come out looking like a He-Man placard for a toy ad, but heaven forbid somethin as interesting in a game as romance not lead to rolls to see if I develop a burning sensation or some form of aboleth mucus?


What the what? The whole idea of role playing is that the character is not the player.

The whole idea of the argument is that in character actions can be used in a way so as to be used against the player.



No, the implication is that some of the partners you find have a venerial disease.

No, the implication of "roll every time" is not that some have a chance, it's that everyone does. Always. It makes it bizarre, and in games where every other similar instance is ignored, it says something that this one act gets called out for consequences.

I have to worry about a yeast infection? You need to worry about PTSD. It's only fair, right? Realism.


This is an entirely reasonable thing to think, but the last group I played with has led me to believe people aren't as reasonable about that sort of thing as you might hope. I've been accused of racism because I played a bigoted elf who was keenly aware of the fact that everyone in the group was going to be dead of old age (and their grandchildren reaching adulthood) before he hit middle-aged.
(The fact that they were perfectly okay with another player being straight-up racist and using made-up slurs against elves, though... well, there's a reason that group no longer plays at my apartment, nor I with them.)

Some people are astonishingly stupid about keeping players and their characters separated.

Yeah. It's unfortunate. We cannot keep emotional distance quote so easily as intellectual distance.


Why WOULDN'T there be consequences?

Because you are taking something said in brief, and blowing it up, scrutinizing it, only allowing the possible negative aspects (forced retirement from the game, forced social issues, etc.) and denying any of the benefits.

You don't develop an unsightly itch from not having TP in a dungeon. You don't need to worry about people tracking you by your pee puddles in corners. You don't need to make sure you ingest the prose calories. You don't suffer scurvy for living entirely on rations, nor do you suffer protein starvation for only ever hunting animals for meat all the time. You don't walk around in greasy unwashed clothes because you forget to say you bought soap. You don't die of disease because you cut your steak with the same knife that went into the carrion crawler's guts last week. You don't toss and turn on an unfamiliar mattress. You don't wake up in a panic with every unfamiliar noise. You don't ever have nightmares or dreams.

But sex? My! That's different for no reason! Totally needs detailed examination and consequences. Can't just be hand waved as 'handled well' like everything above.


You can ask that question about anything in the game.

We do ask that question about everything in the game. The things that have good answers are atill in the game. The things that don't we get rid of.

So what's good and game enhancing about forces consequences for sex?

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-22, 03:23 AM
So what's good and game enhancing about forces consequences for sex? While you may not see it, I see a phenomenal plethora of roleplaying potential.

One time I roleplayed a clairvoyant who was mute. Why? Because it was awesome. Next character I make will probably be pregnant. Why? Because it sounds awesome.

Personally I can only think of two instances where sex and love made their way into a campaign. One was a fellow player running a seductress in Vampire. The other was the afore mentioned clairvoyant mute, in which case things got really weird, really fast. Being unable to meaningfully make your feelings known makes for strange love triangles. Having long-time friends shamlessly flirt with you makes your real-life awkward.

Coidzor
2015-02-22, 03:40 AM
While you may not see it, I see a phenomenal plethora of roleplaying potential.

One time I roleplayed a clairvoyant who was mute. Why? Because it was awesome. Next character I make will probably be pregnant. Why? Because it sounds awesome.

You don't see any difference between intentionally creating a character who starts the campaign as pregnant and having a character who gets decommissioned by fiated up/secret pregnancy rules midcampaign? :smallconfused:

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-22, 03:42 AM
You don't see any difference between intentionally creating a character who starts the campaign as pregnant and having a character who gets decommissioned by fiated up/secret pregnancy rules midcampaign? :smallconfused: Nope. Either way I'm playing the character. I don't put much stock in "GMs" and their "rules".

johnbragg
2015-02-22, 06:21 AM
These consequences are neither good or bad, they just are. They're not punishment...they are just possible outcomes.

This is completely untrue in a universe controlled by a conscious mind with free will. If there are pregnancy rules, or STD disease rules in your campaign, YOU PUT THEM THERE! How can you turn around and shrug, "hey, it's not a punishment, it's just a possible outcome of your actions?" Especially when it's entirely plausible to handwave magical precautions against that sort of thing, or handwave a sort of "herd immunity" given the availability of cure disease spells.

BWR
2015-02-22, 08:26 AM
So I'd say it's a pretty big "screw you" to the hapless player who's trying to Errol Flynn with his Tier 4 or 5 character, who finally gets a Moment of Awesome--and then has to roll to see if he (or she) gets the magic clap.


Again, communicate what you want to do before you do it. anyway, as has been pointed out, disease is pretty trivial in D&D.



Or for the player of a female PC, who puts in the effort of roleplaying a courtship with a "good match" of an NPC husband, or a PC-PC romance, who gets all the fun of having their character out of commission for at least 3-4 months of game-world time.

Yes, that happens. Somehow it isn't a big problem, it merely makes for better games.


Have you known any pregnant women?
Relevancy? Yes, btw.


So at your gaming table people of different opinions can civilly and sensibly discuss the morality of abortion in the game world?
Yes, we are capable of in some way taking on a different moral code than we might have IRL and thinking sensibly about it and having our characters act in a way that takes into account their personal moral codes, desires and in game social mores.


Things with mechanical penalties are things that characters try to avoid. It is entirely within your discretion as DM whether there are possible game-mechanical penalties for having sex. In choosing to assess those penalties, or roll for those penalties, you are punishing the PC for having sex.
Am I punishing PCs if they go to a dungeon and things try to kill them when all they want is some safe loot? Am I punishing a player by having his PCs attacked when all the player wants to do is go around beating up random NPCs for ****s and giggles? Am I punishing players whose PCs get caught in an avalanche because they insisted on skiing on dangerous slopes? Or am I merely enforcing consequences of their actions? I see no difference.


Poor analogy. We're talking about PCs having sex, which is presumably voluntary. PCs should take damage for _jumping_ off a cliff--that is an example of something you're Not Supposed To Do.
.
But they shouldn't take damage for accidentally falling off a cliff? Anyway, again: actions have consequences. Falling off a cliff hurts you. having sex can result in children. I really cannot see why people are arguing that the default for sex should be sex = not-children unless this is clearly agreed upon beforehand.


Yes, I believe everyone agrees on that.
Good. Now we just need to agree on what should be assumed at the start of a game.



I find that assumption, and your application of it, to be a flawed standard. Real world rules apply, but common sense should determine what is and is not addressed in game, with an eye on what makes a better roleplaying experience.

'Common sense' isn't always that common. And I'm talking 'shared' rather than 'occurs frequently'. For some reason, consequences for sex don't actually decrease the fun of the games I play in, but actually make them better.



You've hit your players--presumably one of your players, even if the PC was a father--with an unplanned pregnancy? Sweet Jeebus, I'm in the "Worst DM You've Ever Had Thread.".
PCs fathers and mothers, male and female players. They were all given the option to take care of it in some manner. Somehow, things just got more interesting when they decided to keep them. Some kids have even become PCs in later iterations of the games. And somehow this doesn't make the game worse.



What did the expectant mother's player do during the sessions when her character was out of commission?
Or was the pregnancy planned? Did the campaign just time-shift a year or so, or what?
Planned. Unplanned. Downtime, mostly, with some non-combat stuff in there. It varies.



So you're punishing the players for doing something you don't want them to do in game?


*SIGH* No, I am not punishing people for doing stuff I don't want them to. I am, as I have said several times now, enforcing consequences of actions. Nature doesn't give a **** if you **** for fun, do it without protection and you can end up pregnant. I try to be nature. If your PC acts like a jerk towards people, don't be surprised if people don't like him. If you think sticking your hand in the pitchblack demon's mouth sounds fun, don't be surprised if it comes back missing. If you have unprotected sex, don't be surprised if a kid comes along.



Though, you're also using rules they're already familiar with to interact with them in the one form of punishment as opposed to the surprise unknown rules about STDs and pregnancy. Or punishing them for not using the contraception that didn't actually exist until you decided that it existed but you were keeping it a secret from them.
Um, where are you getting this stuff from? Because I'm pretty sure I never said I spring surprises like this on people. I certainly don't go around doing what you accuse me of. I don't go around laying 'gotcha' traps except in dungeons.




You can definitely criticize someone for springing rules on you and playing Gotcha as a viable GMing tactic in games which aren't already predicated on a version of Mao.

Sure. Except I don't do that. I don't know where the hell you got that idea from. For the nth time, actions have consequences. In game, sex is the primary means of procreation. Why are people so damned surprised that sex without contraceptives might end up in pregnancies? My players seem to understand this just fine so I simply cannot comprehend why other people cannot.




I admit that yes, I did miss you saying that. Where was that again? :smallconfused: I just went back through the thread looking for your contributions to this tangent and I haven't found any sort of statement along those lines.



I see it more akin to "why are all these guards attacking me when I just started stealing the king's silver in front of him?": in most games the king is going to react poorly to people stealing from him.
There are plenty of actions that have reasonable in game and real world results and I don't see anyone complaining about those here. In general, most beings procreate by sexual intercourse in the game so engaging in it has expected results in game. As all the reasonable people here have already pointed out, it's a matter of expectations for the games, but as a default you can't complain if your actions have consequences.

I guess it is unclear, but the intent of the statement was that people should agree on what they want in a game before they start. You can't always cover everything beforehand so if there are disagreements in game, argue your case like a rational person and try to come to an agreement with the other party.




I have, however, found The Insanity and jqavins saying that it's the player's fault if they don't know how the GM is going to run with it in the first place, despite the fact that for the players to know how the GM is going to run something, the GM has to communicate with them, otherwise it's, y'know, assuming that players are mind-readers. :smallconfused:

Having mind reading players does make the game easier. except, you know, when they know how to solve every situation you throw at them.



IWe do ask that question about everything in the game. The things that have good answers are atill in the game. The things that don't we get rid of.

So what's good and game enhancing about forces consequences for sex?

Character and story development, quite simply. It works for our group and has lead to fun stuff. If you don't want it in your game, ask about consequences before you do something.

But just to clearly state my case and hope that's the last I will have to say about it.
- PC actions have consequences
- consequences are not punishment
- sex happens
- possible consequences of unprotected sex are pregnancy and STDs. Possible, not guaranteed.
- PCs have the option of refraining from sex. Rape is vanishingly rare in our games, at least as directly involves PCs.
- PCs have the option of handling pregnancy in pretty much whatever way they choose. Abortion, bringing it to term and giving away, raising the kid; whatever.
- Contraceptives exist in some games. Like any other piece of gear, it's up to the player/PC to find out if it exists and make sure they have it.
- random diseases sometimes strike. Saves and Remove Disease usually make this a non-issue so it rarely makes sense to make a big deal of it.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 09:34 AM
Can someone explain to me why having children in a game can only be a negative punishment to the player? I've seen that stated repeatedly, but I don't see them explaining why they think that is.

In every game I've played in and run, whenever the possibility of children came up, it only increased interest in the game. It's a great piece of roleplay to see how the character would react in that situation. Some skip town, some abort the child and/or mother, some start sending a portion of their loot to help raise it, and some retired from the adventuring business to settle down. In the case of female PCs, pregnancy only happens if the players are okay with it. And if they are, then they will enjoy roleplaying the complications that come from traveling with a pregnant woman, if they don't decide to time skip the pregnancy portion.

Roleplaying is all about overcoming obstacles and complications. Why are the ones related to sex so much worse than the ones related to killing? If all you want to do is raid dungeons and bed maidens without consequence, then go for it, it's your game! But don't assume everyone is adverse to negative things happening to their character. (Which is not the same thing as negative things happening to the player)

And Tengu, not cool. Nearly half of the players I've played with over the years have been women, and in every instance they were treated with just as much respect as the rest of my players. I don't think anyone in this thread has advocated forcing a female PC to become pregnant against the player's will. If they have, they've been in the minority of posters.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-22, 09:43 AM
So, yeah, when one player tries to force the other player into having their character decommissioned when previously that other player had been an ally of the first player, that's probably a bit of an interpersonal betrayal that suggests there's something up, because if they were that good at working together that they decided their characters should get romantically involved in the first place, why the sudden disagreement as to whether one's character should give another an STD or get them pregnant? That's just fishy.

Plus, y'know, it's still unseemly for one player to just enforce his or her view of how every other player's characters should be because they are better at rolling dice, you have to have limits above and beyond the rules as far as how people interact with one another at the table.

Ever played a freeform game with combat in it? It's awfully common for two players to write together in perfect harmony... up untill it comes the time to decide what happens at the end.

Then you get multipage OOC arguments before a compromise is eventually reached. Maybe one player quits the game because they're frustrated they can't win over the other person with their argument. This is not fishy, it's normal. And combat's just one example. You can get similar arguments about every little silly thing. In a Bleach game, we first had one about whether a character could own guns, then another about a character backstory where the character in question had a crush on her adopted sibling. The latter example is especially worth noting because that element was part of only that character's history and not influential to the game beyond her - but a lot of people objected on its presence on principle, even though nothing demanded they pay any attention to it.

Dice and GMs as referees were added to games precisely to avoid this sort of thing, so you didn't have to go through this process every time players disagree. You're looking at it the wrong way around. The game rules are limits above and beyond those people normally follow. If you consider player conflict over game things to be something "fishy" and requiring to be solved outside of the game, you have not really agreed to play the game in the first place.


I think my favorite part is that the people who want to assume consequences are the ones who apparently don't want to follow up on that. You have alchemical wonders that put real world medicine to shame, but apparently you can't imagine them having access to a literally magical contraception drug, or a magic device that functions similarly.

The question isn't whether I, as a GM or another player, can follow up on them. It's whether the player of the character does - those are the meaningful choices associated with the situation. Handwaving them away cuts at the amount of possible in-game events and character roleplay. If I'm the GM, that's doing the player's work for them.


Do you also roll for whether drunk drivers hit you on the street or loose shingles falling from roofs?

Drunk drivers not so much (but thanks for the idea), but collapsing roofs are a classic random encounter. It is the sort of thing I would check when logical, because it has potentially interesting ramifications for a game.

If you think the above are inconsequential, then how about a lone boot stuck on a tree branch? That's been a mainstay random event in my games for years now.


Hey, folks! Have you ever wondered why RPGs are still a primarily male-dominated hobby, and RPG players have a reputation of being creepy neckbeards? Read this thread, realize that apparently "don't drop an unplanned pregnancy on your female PCs unless you know in advance the players are okay with it" is a controversial statement that evokes mixed reaction, instead of a single-voiced "well duh, the alternative is incredibly creepy", and wonder no more!

Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to rape PCs, without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand? Bonus points if you use realism as an excuse for doing that!

Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to use Mage's Disjunction on the players without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand!

I could buy your line of argument, if unplanned pregnancy and diseases actually were strong taboos in my society - but they aren't. Contraception, pregnancy, diseases, these are all parts of normal life, and in everyday discussion, it's plenty common for women to bring these up out-of-the-blue. The same can be said about urinating and defecating. Sure, they're not usual choices of topic, and may push the boundary of what's in good taste - but when a discussion is between friends, such faux passes are usually taken with humor. (Indeed, it's usually safe to assume the faux pass was intentionally made to be funny.) Ditto if a discussion is framed to the context of a game or, say, a horror movie, where some deviation from what's normal is expected. Likening them to rape is extremely disingenuous.

Hence, as the example of Mage's Disjunction should've hinted, I don't think this has much to do with taboos surrounding sex or sexism. This same attitude is found in regards to purely in-game constructs, such as spells. "The GM allowed something bad to happen to my character without my permission!" ---> "The GM is out to get me!!" ----> "The GM is an awful person and I should leave the game!" It arises from the thoughts that player characters are sacrosant, RPGs are purely co-operative and any player conflict is automatically an out-of-game issue.

This feeds to my reply to RPGGuru just as well. I don't need to assume whether the defenses against Mage's Disjunction exist, you can find many of them ready-made in the books. The question is, again, whether the player thinks to use them. That's supposed to be the player's prerogative.

---
EDIT:

Really, why are people so caught up on the consequences of sex and not the dangers of improper hygiene? A lot more people died of dysentery, not to mention countless other diseases, from poor hygiene and improperly kept latrines than STIs, yet that is trivial while the dangers of sex are vitally important.

1st Ed AD&D DMG includes hygiene and consequences thereof, unsurprisingly, under the heading "diseases and parasites" - the same place where you can find veneral diseases.

Even post-2nd edition games include mundane diseases as a potential threat, with several character abilities specifically directed towards dealing with them. (References to veneral diseases specifically may have been removed, for the same reasons we for a while had Tanarii and Baatezu instead of demons and devils - I'm not sure, as I don't own 2nd ed books.)

As with managing food, light sources and mapping, these things were intended to be non-trivial and important parts of the game. They were later removed from other games for various reasons.

1st Edition random encounters also included stuff like a drunken mob, as well as prostitutes and an occasion of a goodwife crying "RAPE!" in order to get the PCs lynched.

And it wasn't because of "realism" (though Gykax did say realism is attempted where it improves the game), it was because those sorts of things were actual parts of some of the pulp stories and fiction D&D drew inspiration from. Also, see what I wrote about saving throws before.

jqavins
2015-02-22, 10:09 AM
Hey, folks! Have you ever wondered why RPGs are still a primarily male-dominated hobby, and RPG players have a reputation of being creepy neckbeards?
Because stupid stereotypes die hard. I've been playing RPGs for almost 40 years, and the players I've known have been somewhere around 30 or 40 percent female. And somewhere around 5 percent socoal cripples.


Then what is it, exactly, when you're accidentally punishing someone for doing something rather than deliberately punishing them? And what's the difference to the person being punished?
The very fact that you can type out the words "accidentally punishing" makes me think that you really don't know what it means.

It's a corrective measure taken in response to a action that is wrong or inappropriate.
Which makes "accidentally punishing someone" an oxymoron.

Well, but then I think again about previous posts, and I think that you do know what it means and you really believe that any GM who imposes a ruling against a character that you think is wrong is actually punishing that character or player in the true sense. I have come to realize that you have a great contempt for GMs whose view of what belongs in a game differs from your own. Just maybe even a contempt for GMs in genersl, which finds easy expression when disagreements arrise. And it's very easy to ascribe ill intent when starting from a position of contempt.

But, to answer your question: it could be inconsiderate. It could be ill-conceived (no pun intended.) It could be due to a GM's mistaken assumption that this is welcome in a given group. It could be due to a single player's mistaken assumption that it is not. It could be any of lots of things. In could even be punative, but to assume it is, or to honestly believe that it must always be punative, is foolish.


My bad, I forgot to put the air quotes around the word "plot" or otherwise indicate my contempt for GMs who act that way.
And, there it is.

Solaris
2015-02-22, 10:09 AM
Can someone explain to me why having children in a game can only be a negative punishment to the player? I've seen that stated repeatedly, but I don't see them explaining why they think that is.

"Your character is pregnant, roll a new one 'cause she can't adventure for the rest of the game."
"Your character now has familial responsibilities, 'cause he's now a father! Guess where his gold's going now!"

That goes double if the player didn't want their character to have kids. Honest, the risks of pregnancy are really, really low even if you do screw up with the protection. It's more realistic to ignore them than it is to come up with tables for it to 'randomly' happen and inflict unwanted children on the players.
D&D is an adventure game. If I wanted a game where I raised a family, I'd play the Sims.


I could buy your line of argument, if unplanned pregnancy and diseases actually were strong taboos in my society - but they aren't. Contraception, pregnancy, diseases, these are all parts of normal life, and in everyday discussion, it's plenty common for women to bring these up out-of-the-blue. The same can be said about urinating and defecating. Sure, they're not usual choices of topic, and may push the boundary of what's in good taste - but when a discussion is between friends, such faux passes are usually taken with humor. (Indeed, it's usually safe to assume the faux pass was intentionally made to be funny.) Ditto if a discussion is framed to the context of a game or, say, a horror movie, where some deviation from what's normal is expected. Likening them to rape is extremely disingenuous.

When you say your society, do you mean the one you and your players share, or the one in your game?
'Cause they're pretty strong taboos where I come from.


Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to use Mage's Disjunction on the players without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand!

snip

Hence, as the example of Mage's Disjunction should've hinted, I don't think this has much to do with taboos surrounding sex or sexism. This same attitude is found in regards to purely in-game constructs, such as spells. "The GM allowed something bad to happen to my character without my permission!" ---> "The GM is out to get me!!" ----> "The GM is an awful person and I should leave the game!" It arises from the thoughts that player characters are sacrosant, RPGs are purely co-operative and any player conflict is automatically an out-of-game issue.

This feeds to my reply to RPGGuru just as well. I don't need to assume whether the defenses against Mage's Disjunction exist, you can find many of them ready-made in the books. The question is, again, whether the player thinks to use them. That's supposed to be the player's prerogative.

---
EDIT:


1st Ed AD&D DMG includes hygiene and consequences thereof, unsurprisingly, under the heading "diseases and parasites" - the same place where you can find veneral diseases.

Even post-2nd edition games include mundane diseases as a potential threat, with several character abilities specifically directed towards dealing with them. (References to veneral diseases specifically may have been removed, for the same reasons we for a while had Tanarii and Baatezu instead of demons and devils - I'm not sure, as I don't own 2nd ed books.)

As with managing food, light sources and mapping, these things were intended to be non-trivial and important parts of the game. They were later removed from other games for various reasons.

1st Edition random encounters also included stuff like a drunken mob, as well as prostitutes and an occasion of a goodwife crying "RAPE!" in order to get the PCs lynched.

And it wasn't because of "realism" (though Gykax did say realism is attempted where it improves the game), it was because those sorts of things were actual parts of some of the pulp stories and fiction D&D drew inspiration from. Also, see what I wrote about saving throws before.

Show me the tables for venereal disease and pregnancy in Third Edition, 'cause I can show you where Mage's Disjunction is actually a part of the game.
There are reasons those things weren't ported over to the newer editions of the game. They don't really contribute anything. The game is not improved by their presence (except for survival-type games).

And player characters are off-limits to the GM, at least to an extent. Slapping them with Mage's Disjunction is a reasonable thing to happen if they play against a high-level mage. Randomly hitting them with punishments is not a reasonable thing to happen to them. Just look at the discussion in the thread about character backstories - a lot of players don't like having their character messed with in arbitrary ways.


Which makes "accidentally punishing someone" an oxymoron.

You'll have to forgive me for not taking one poster's narrow definition over the one used by the rest of society.


The very fact that you can type out the words "accidentally punishing" makes me think that you really don't know what it means.

Well, but then I think again about previous posts, and I think that you do know what it means and you really believe that any GM who imposes a ruling against a character that you think is wrong is actually punishing that character or player in the true sense. I have come to realize that you have a great contempt for GMs whose view of what belongs in a game differs from your own. Just maybe even a contempt for GMs in genersl, which finds easy expression when disagreements arrise. And it's very easy to ascribe ill intent when starting from a position of contempt.

But, to answer your question: it could be inconsiderate. It could be ill-conceived (no pun intended.) It could be due to a GM's mistaken assumption that this is welcome in a given group. It could be due to a single player's mistaken assumption that it is not. It could be any of lots of things. In could even be punative, but to assume it is, or to honestly believe that it must always be punative, is foolish.

How else would you objectively term negative consequences arbitrarily assigned at the judgment of the governing body?

If I were to go to jail for the rest of my life because I punched a cop, that would be a punishment. The judicial system wouldn't have any malevolent or vindictive intent towards me, but that wouldn't change the fact that it's a punishment.

If I were to jump the starting line and the referee penalizes me by fining me and making me sit out the rest of the game, that would be a punishment. He wouldn't have to have any malevolent or vindictive intent towards me, but that wouldn't change the fact that it's a punishment.

Subjectively, the DM doesn't have to intend it to be a punishment. That does not matter to anyone outside his head, because objectively, negative consequences are punishments. That's acceptable when they fall under the purview of the agreed-upon rules of the game, but there are no such rules in D&D 3.5E or subsequent editions.



And, there it is.

So you prefer a railroad where your actions mean little and the only thing of any importance is what the DM decides?
'Cause that's what I was referring to.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 10:54 AM
"Your character is pregnant, roll a new one 'cause she can't adventure for the rest of the game."
"Your character now has familial responsibilities, 'cause he's now a father! Guess where his gold's going now!"

That goes double if the player didn't want their character to have kids. Honest, the risks of pregnancy are really, really low even if you do screw up with the protection. It's more realistic to ignore them than it is to come up with tables for it to 'randomly' happen and inflict unwanted children on the players.
D&D is an adventure game. If I wanted a game where I raised a family, I'd play the Sims.

... Did you read anything I wrote beyond the first line? Because you're acting like every single player ever is going to flip the table the second something unexpected happens to their character. Not every player plays the game as an ever climbing treadmill of greater numbers. Negative consequences for the character are not punishments towards the player, from the perspective of either side of the table. There are a lot of people that enjoy seeing their characters develop through both the good and the bad things that happen to them. Lost limbs, new allies, accidental children, powerful artifacts, they're all tools for the character to develop and grow.

You don't want to play with the chance of pregnancy or STIs happening in your games? Great! Don't! But don't assume everyone else hates the concept as much as you do. My players don't mind when stuff like that happens. Heck, a lot of them enjoy it, and some their favorite moments at the table have developed from it happening.

jqavins
2015-02-22, 11:15 AM
The whole idea of the argument is that in character actions can be used in a way so as to be used against the player.
(This development can be used) + (this came out poorly for the character) does not equal (this is used against the player). The assumption of ill intent is completely without basis or merit.


No, the implication of "roll every time" is not that some have a chance, it's that everyone does. Always. It makes it bizarre, and in games where every other similar instance is ignored, it says something that this one act gets called out for consequences.
Wrong. Let's say I screw a prostitute and there is - taking numbers out of the air - a one in five chace that she's infected. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't; I can't know. All I do know is that it's one in five. When I have sex with her, in the case where she is not infected I can't get anything from her, obviously. In the case wherer she is infected I have - again, out of the air - a 50:50 chance of catching it from her. This means that going into the transaction, I have a chance of catching the disease of 0.20 * 0.5 or 10%. I roll a d20 and get an STD on a 1 or 2. I could do the rolls differently - on a 1 to 4 she's infected and if she is I make a second roll and catch the disease on a 1 to 10 - but there's no point in that complication* because the single roll has exactly the same effect. If no one has any STDs then there is no roll to make. I have to make a roll beause some people do.

* Unless she is having sex with multiple customers. In that case it is necessary to roll for her status first and each customer subsequently if she's positive, because then it would not be true that each customer has an independant 10% chance of catching something.

jqavins
2015-02-22, 12:28 PM
How else would you objectively term negative consequences arbitrarily assigned at the judgment of the governing body?
I would call them "arbitrary negative consequences," though not all negative consequences are.


If I were to go to jail for the rest of my life because I punched a cop, that would be a punishment.
Yes, it would. It would be excessive punishment, too. Going to jail for a month would be appropriate punishment. In either case, it would be the court imposing something bad on you in retalaition for something you did. The cout's intention would be make you suffer for what you'd done; that's punisment.


The judicial system wouldn't have any malevolent or vindictive intent towards me, but that wouldn't change the fact that it's a punishment.
Quite so. Unless the judge who imposes the life sentence is doing so for personal reasons.A definite possibility, but far from certain.

Now, if unbeknownced to you the cop had an iron jaw and you broke your hand, that would also be suffering for what you'd done, but it would not be punishment. If it was an RP character who punched the cop with the iron jaw and suffered a broken hand, that's not necessarily punishment by the GM. In a game where no cop had ever before had an iron jaw until suddenly this one did, that would be arbitrary and unfair. And it may even have had punative intent, but you can't assume it idid. If the GM just figured everyone knows that a few cops have iron jaws and went with it, then it's a mistake. If a player assumed cops can be punched with impunity because they never have iron jaws, that's also a mistake.


If I were to jump the starting line and the referee penalizes me by fining me and making me sit out the rest of the game, that would be a punishment. He wouldn't have to have any malevolent or vindictive intent towards me, but that wouldn't change the fact that it's a punishment.
Absolutely right. It would be a consequence imposed as retribution for an action, an excellent definition of punishment.


Subjectively, the DM doesn't have to intend it to be a punishment. That does not matter to anyone outside his head, because objectively, negative consequences are punishments.
Bull. Intention matters a great deal. There've been times when, through action or inaction, my wife has cost us a great deal of money*, and once nearly bankrupted us. I was angry, but it was a mistake, and we dealt with it and moved on. If she'd intended to do it, I'd have left her. If I'd shared your attitude that only the directly observable effect matters, and that if it looks the same as some sort of punishment might look then it is punishment, then I'd have had to believe that she was punishing me financially for something (and I'm sure I could have made up something) and leave her.

Intention isn't everythig, but it counts for a hell of a lot. And it is the difference between punishment and other sorts of bad stuff that happens.


So you prefer a railroad where your actions mean little and the only thing of any importance is what the DM decides?
'Cause that's what I was referring to.
No, I prefer a game where your actions mean a great deal, and logical result follow them. And I know what you were referring to. Like you, I dislike games run by what we might agree to call "railroad GMs." And I try not to play in games with GMs who've proven themselves to be like that. What I was referring to was the "contempt," which I found telling.

* And I likewise.

jqavins
2015-02-22, 12:36 PM
I have, however, found The Insanity and jqavins saying that it's the player's fault if they don't know how the GM is going to run with it in the first place, despite the fact that for the players to know how the GM is going to run something, the GM has to communicate with them, otherwise it's, y'know, assuming that players are mind-readers. :smallconfused:
Then I'd like to know who's been posting in my name, because this jqavins has not written that. I have written that the players are not entitled to assume there won't be STD or pregnency rolls, but not that it's the player's fault when conflicts arise.

Solaris
2015-02-22, 12:40 PM
... Did you read anything I wrote beyond the first line? Because you're acting like every single player ever is going to flip the table the second something unexpected happens to their character. Not every player plays the game as an ever climbing treadmill of greater numbers. Negative consequences for the character are not punishments towards the player, from the perspective of either side of the table. There are a lot of people that enjoy seeing their characters develop through both the good and the bad things that happen to them. Lost limbs, new allies, accidental children, powerful artifacts, they're all tools for the character to develop and grow.

You don't want to play with the chance of pregnancy or STIs happening in your games? Great! Don't! But don't assume everyone else hates the concept as much as you do. My players don't mind when stuff like that happens. Heck, a lot of them enjoy it, and some their favorite moments at the table have developed from it happening.

If you don't want a question answered, don't ask it. Other people have different motivations than your own and that they might want different things than you do, and that's simply the way it is. Don't sit there and heap more contempt on people who don't want to get knocked up in an RPG (and assume that others wouldn't want that without at least an out-of-game discussion with the DM), and expect to be taken as anything but a troll.
I mean, really, what the heck did you think was going to happen when you asked the other side of a debate their opinion? That they'd echo your own? Your post where you voice your opinion and your experiences in no way invalidates those of everyone else who has a dissenting opinion.

I'm sorry you're catching the impression I think that every player will react as though their character had been violated when they got an unwanted pregnancy. I'm sure there are a few who'd be as thrilled by the concept as your players, but most people I've encountered would not be so happy about it. That's why they tend to use things like contraceptives and why the concept of safe sex is such a popular one with the crowd who don't have an INT penalty. Sure, it's great that you've had a good experience with inflicting an unwanted pregnancy on your PCs. Rock on. That doesn't change the fact that doing so arbitrarily and without a metagame warning that the DM has invented 'realistic' rules that ignore the second-order results of a society with magic and alchemy is probably going to elicit a negative response from the players, whether it upsets them or simply deters them from bumping uglies with other characters. Just because it's an opportunity to roleplay doesn't mean it's necessarily one the players want to explore. A lot of people have explored those options in real life, and it can be something of a touchy subject with them.

When part of your point is that some people enjoy that sort of thing, it really undermines you when you insult someone who made the mistake of responding to your posts by attempting to explain why some other people don't. It's well and good to state some people have enjoyed it and that it has a place in some games, but implicit in that statement is the understanding that other people won't enjoy it and that it doesn't have a place in other games.

***

Here's an idea, kids. Let's not open up posts with "You're clearly an idiot" or "You obviously don't know what you're taking about". I know, I know, it's really fun to insult other people and put them down, but it's really not contributing anything to the discussion and just makes it look like you're trying to start a flame war in the middle of the discussion. I know I've bitten on to some of your trollbait, but I've tried real hard to keep it civil. Maybe not as civil as you'd like, but there are limits to my tact. It's all well and good to disagree with someone. It is not good to suggest, imply, or state that they are morons and semi-literate buffoons because they do so.

I'm done with that. From here on out, you insult someone in your posts with something that can be boiled down to "You can't possibly know what you're talking about" or "You must be an idiot for disagreeing with me", I'm not going to try and argue with you. I'm going to report you to the mods.

wumpus
2015-02-22, 12:51 PM
That's still creepy and wrong if people didn't agree beforehand that they're comfortable with such things happening, yes. And really, why do you treat characters differently depending on whether their player is male or female?


I put a footnote to begin to explain that by [a female PC] "played by a guy" is a rather clichéd style of role playing where the player never considers the character's interest, just the player (as a controller/observer). I did mention that should a player even be attempting to play in the character's interest this wouldn't happen.

I'm still waiting for those who insist on rolling for STDs/pregnancy (especially because *realism*) to tell us all the times they rolled for dysentery/plague/leprosy.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-22, 01:01 PM
I'm still waiting for those who insist on rolling for STDs/pregnancy (especially because *realism*) to tell us all the times they rolled for dysentery/plague/leprosy.Amusingly enough, I've rolled for cholera (close enough to dysentery for this discussion) and plague in Exalted games of mine, though never once for syphilis or leprosy (all four of which are represented mechanically in the game's rules).

That said, I was also the one who sprang a baby on a PC, produced by demonic lesbian parthenogenesis, a few pages upthread.

But I don't insist on rolling for these things; I only call for them when it's both something the players are okay with exploring, and set up in such a way that rolling will produce interesting results, good or bad.

The PC was the ship's surgeon on a merchant vessel; during a stopover the locals were having medical problems, and while she treated them for what turned out to be the bloody flux, she didn't think to say anything about it to the people on board; she didn't know one of the reasons for the ship's stopover was because their water had gone bad (as it tends to do on ships) and that the purser was watering the ship with flux-tainted water.

By the time they were underway again, I was rolling to see how fast the disease was spreading, and whether she could treat everyone in time. I didn't roll for her personally, both because as [essentially-undead] she's more-or-less immune to mortal diseases anyway, and her chances of contaminating others with it were minimal because she's knowledgeable enough to employ safety precautions against exactly that.

She ended up saving every man jack of them, but only barely.

Valameer
2015-02-22, 01:19 PM
Let's say I screw a prostitute and there is - taking numbers out of the air - a one in five chace that she's infected. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't; I can't know. All I do know is that it's one in five. When I have sex with her, in the case where she is not infected I can't get anything from her, obviously. In the case wherer she is infected I have - again, out of the air - a 50:50 chance of catching it from her. This means that going into the transaction, I have a chance of catching the disease of 0.20 * 0.5 or 10%. I roll a d20 and get an STD on a 1 or 2. I could do the rolls differently - on a 1 to 4 she's infected and if she is I make a second roll and catch the disease on a 1 to 10 - but there's no point in that complication* because the single roll has exactly the same effect. If no one has any STDs then there is no roll to make. I have to make a roll beause some people do.

* Unless she is having sex with multiple customers. In that case it is necessary to roll for her status first and each customer subsequently if she's positive, because then it would not be true that each customer has an independant 10% chance of catching something.

Nice rules.

You made those up yourself, didn't you? You had to, I would assume, because the game you play doesn't already have those rules written for you in the book. It doesn't have them in the book because the designer didn't necessarily intend those rules to be a part of the game.

So you added them.

You realise that by adding unnecessary rules to the game about an aspect the game designers found unworthy of highlighting, you are purposefully choosing to add in consequences to certain actions? Some might say that you adding in those rules would be a way to punish characters that engage in the behaviour that you decided to make risky.

Realism? Consequences? That's fine. We all have different things about roleplaying games that we find fun. But please don't assume that your way is the default. If anything, if you are going to add in consequence rules for sexual behaviour, you should probably be up front about that to your players. Since they won't be familiar with those rules from the book. Making it be a disadvantage (even slightly) to play as a female character quickly crosses into scary-GM story-territory! Your players may assume that their character is being safe, or that playing a sexually active character could just be a mostly background part of the fiction of your game. You would probably want your GM to let you know before hand if he added his own rules for Critical Fumbles into your game, right?

Come to think of it - Critical Fumbles are realistic, aren't they? Why, swinging a sharpened piece of steel is pretty dangerous, after all. And think of the extra roleplaying opportunities added by a character accidentally chopping their own fingers off! Well, if they didn't want that risk, they shouldn't have made a fighter. Using magic in combat is far safer, after all. Everyone knows that.

I would also like to see your rules for determining if an inn is lousy or not, and the consequence rolls for drinking water from a wild stream, or even eating at tavern. I've heard tales from friends that had dysentery take over their campaign, and it turned into an unexpectedly epic struggle for survival. Fun!

For the rest of us, I guess pregnancy, rape, STIs, finding out you are the BBEG when you sleepwalk, unexpected retirement, apotheosis to divinity, amputations and other vastly altering character stuff will just have to continue to be worked out collaboratively between the GM and the player, instead of popping up in the delightfully unexpected way of random rolling.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 02:19 PM
@Solaris: I asked what I did because I was trying to understand the stance that some people seemed being taking that any unexpected negative consequence of a player action was a punishment against the player, and not just a complication for the character. I guess I should have emphasized the "only" part of that question. Your response read to me "Because you're forcing them to retire their character/lose their loot!" even though the very post you were replying to had options other than those two extremes listed. Yes, forcing a player to retire a character is bad. That should be obvious. But retiring a character is not the only option in that situation. Saying that I insulted you by asking if you read the entire post is insulting, because your response was already included in my original post, without the snark. All I wanted to know was why the people against PCs having unexpected children seemed to think that it could only cause a negative impact on the game, instead of a potentially positive one.

If people can't concede points in a debate, then they're not debating, they're just arguing with each other. If your stance is "unexpected pregnancies are never a good thing in a game", and my response is "some groups enjoy the complications that come with pregnancy in a game", then you can either acknowledge that some groups do enjoy it, try to convince me that no, it is never a good thing, or move on. There's no debate in rigid, inflexible stances. If my stance was "unexpected pregnancies are necessary in a game" then I could understand the vitriol I'm receiving from you. If you can't or won't concede that some groups can enjoy the possibility of consequences from sex in a game, then our conversation has reached an impasse, and I'll refrain from continuing this discussion with you. If what I wrote above isn't the stance that you hold, then I apologize for misinterpreting you. I hold no beef against you, or anyone else on any side of this thread.

Every single post I've made in this thread has acknowledged that that style of play wasn't for everyone, and that there was no problem with not enjoying it. Some of my groups enjoy the risk of consequences in sex, others don't. I'm fine with either or, as a player and as a GM, as long as everyone is on the same page. Considering the two extremes being represented in this thread, my average play style runs closer to the middle of the road. I try to stay neutral and open to considering everyone's opinions, regardless of whether or not I personally agree with them.

--------------------------------------

Now, in what may be a misguided effort to reconnect back to the original topic post, sex is being fairly well covered by people's responses, but how do people tend to treat love in their games? I know most of the people I play with tend to not get their characters romantically attached to NPCs or each other. Various NPCs have been in love with each other, but that has tended to stay in the background of the story, and not really be explored by the players, except in cases where they could exploit the relationship for the party's gain. As a player, I've had love connections in backstory, but I've never had one of my characters romantically pursue an NPC in-game.

jqavins
2015-02-22, 02:21 PM
Nice rules.
Actually, that was just a math lesson meant to show that if one is going to have an STD roll after sexual enounteres with random NPCs, it does not imply that all potential partners are infected. And to make the point that suggesting such rules isn't the same as imlying that everyone does, a prior assertion by SiuiS which needed refuting.

Solaris
2015-02-22, 02:53 PM
@ Broken Twin: You know, I've been saying 'unexpected pregnancy' - but would 'unwanted pregnancy' be a better choice of words to explain how it could be a negative to some people? I'm not trying to say that unexpected pregnancies are always bad, only that the DM has to tread very, very carefully when he's making up the rules to inflict them on the players. Like you said, some people are okay with it - but some people are very definitely not.

The Insanity
2015-02-22, 02:56 PM
I have, however, found The Insanity and jqavins saying that it's the player's fault if they don't know how the GM is going to run with it in the first place, despite the fact that for the players to know how the GM is going to run something, the GM has to communicate with them, otherwise it's, y'know, assuming that players are mind-readers. :smallconfused:
I'd really like you to show me where I said anything about it being the player's fault, because I'm pretty sure I never said that.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 03:36 PM
@ Broken Twin: You know, I've been saying 'unexpected pregnancy' - but would 'unwanted pregnancy' be a better choice of words to explain how it could be a negative to some people? I'm not trying to say that unexpected pregnancies are always bad, only that the DM has to tread very, very carefully when he's making up the rules to inflict them on the players. Like you said, some people are okay with it - but some people are very definitely not.

That makes a lot more sense. :smallsmile:

Yeah, I can totally understand how players would be unhappy if their GM forced a pregnancy onto their character. I would never approve of a situation like that regardless of whether or not I was the player in question. And I definitely agree that it's something that the GM needs to be careful with. Like I mentioned previously, some of my players are not fond of the idea, with varying degrees of fervor. A few others just aren't mature enough to handle it, so I exempt them as well. So when any of the above are in the game, it's off the table. They have other things they enjoy that I'll focus on instead. And I'm glad to see we could reach an amiable resolution.

BWR
2015-02-22, 03:53 PM
Now, in what may be a misguided effort to reconnect back to the original topic post, sex is being fairly well covered by people's responses, but how do people tend to treat love in their games? I know most of the people I play with tend to not get their characters romantically attached to NPCs or each other. Various NPCs have been in love with each other, but that has tended to stay in the background of the story, and not really be explored by the players, except in cases where they could exploit the relationship for the party's gain. As a player, I've had love connections in backstory, but I've never had one of my characters romantically pursue an NPC in-game.

I have a hard time restricting myself to only D&D in these threads, try though I might. In most D&D games it's not a big factor. It happens but like sex it's not something that takes a lot of game time because it's not so fun for everyone else to watch one player hog the spotlight. Love (and sex) has played quite prominently in one L5Rish game, where entire character stories have revolved around a love triangle (minimal sex, maximum teen drama), where the consequences of banging a hot chick can come back and haunt you years later, where you have to choose between love (both romantic and paternal) and duty, Roleplaying the younger generations running about and finding mates is considered a good use of game time, and hitting monsters with bits of metal is generally less interesting than finding a new hot girl/boy NPC to get to know.

Jay R
2015-02-22, 04:01 PM
Really, why are people so caught up on the consequences of sex and not the dangers of improper hygiene?

Because sex is more fun to talk about than privies.

-------------------

In Camelot, you are expected to create alliances in marriage. And by the end of a complete campaign, you could be playing the great-grandchildren of your original characters.

-------------------

We recently had to go save one of the party from his dalliance with a succubus.

Him: I had to! She was smokin' hot!
Me: That's supposed to be a metaphor.

-------------------

In a recent 2E game, my character was Ornrandir, a male elven mage/thief, given the title of the Earl of Devon by the king. He was an outcast orphan who had only recently formed any attachments to anybody. I had played him as emotionally undeveloped but brilliant. My wife was playing Rowena, a female human wizard, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had been in an ivory tower (literally) studying magic since she was a child. She played her as an extreme nerd. The royalty had started leaning on us to make political marriages, which is to say that the DM wanted to do some political intrigue. We decided to trump the whole romantic process and sent the following email to the entire gaming group.

A situation has occurred. It will affect the party to some extent, so I guess you should all hear about it. The two of us decided to explain it to you in character, so here it is.

(You may ignore which account this email came from; it was written by the two of us together.)
-----------------------

Rowena has been traveling to Devon Manor regularly to do magical research stuff and help set up the schools there, make scrolls, etc. The next time she visits after a Certain Conversation with the Queen, once she and Ornrandir are alone in the study where they work together on magic, she initiates the following conversation:

Rowena: The Queen tells me I really ought to give some thought to perpetuating magical bloodlines and recommends I consider marrying you.

Ornrandir: I’ve heard similar rumblings. Countess Elanor told me I have to find someone to marry, too. Something about an heir for the county.

Rowena: It is a rational idea. It is just that I have never really considered it before. I have been rather busy learning magic; all that physical stuff seemed so…worldly.

Ornrandir: I certainly know little about it. I’ve never had any family, and I've been an outcast all my life, except for those occasions when the only female I’ve traveled with was Lorelei, the paladin.

Rowena: The gaggle of giggling girls I must spend time with these days seems so focused on the idea.

Ornrandir: I know. Everyone but you is so stupid.

Rowena: I am already spending a lot of time here anyway.

Ornrandir: My servants wouldn’t have to prepare separate rooms for you each time. That would be convenient. And we seem able to get along.

Rowena: After all, we worked well together blasting hundreds of goblins with lightning bolts.

Ornrandir: I enjoyed casting coordinated lightning bolts with you. I’ve never felt so connected to another person before.

Rowena: After that, how difficult could this marriage thing be?

Ornrandir: Love is one of the strongest and most mysterious forces of the universe. Of course, controlling arcane cosmic forces is what wizards do. Maybe we should research a spell for it?

Rowena: As a mage, I will not age as quickly as normals; being elven, you of course will not age at all, so I really do not see why we need to be in a big hurry. And why should I care about being considered – how did she put it? Oh, yes – an "old maid".

Ornrandir: That seems like a meaningless phrase. Everybody becomes old, and an unmarried woman is of course a maid.

Rowena: On the other hand, your life expectancy, given your penchant for getting into trouble, isn’t exactly eternal. [looks him up and down appraisingly] At least if I marry you, you won’t keep getting ripped off by the tailors. You paid far too much for that rag you’re wearing.

Ornrandir: Fine by me. I’d be happy not to have to think about clothes any more.

Rowena: You thought about … that?

Ornrandir: Of course. It has a fleece collar, so I always have the material component for Phantasmal Force, feathers as decorations so I can fly, and several pockets worked into it here for other components. It has two internal pockets for scrolls, this hidden pocket for a dagger, and Lorelei will never figure out where the thieves’ tools are. It's green, for easy concealment in the trees. See? I carefully considered every relevant sartorial issue.

Rowena: I see. Yes, I believe I should take over those decisions. [Pause.] I would prefer to avoid that spectacle that Aduphus went through to marry Lady Stanley. The collective intelligence of her Majesty’s ladies dropped like a stone the instant someone said, “wedding”, and all they could talk about for weeks was fripperies and lace. Why do you think I spent so much time here writing out scrolls?

Ornrandir: Believe me, I understand. Since I developed the gold and mithril mines, all the nobles have been throwing their daughters at me. A year earlier they were offended that I was allowed to carry a weapon, and now they want me to sheathe one in their daughters.

Rowena: So how quickly can we get this over with?

Ornrandir: Well, when they assigned us to go fetch the Prince, we started out on the task immediately. Is the priest available today?

Rowena: I suppose we need to tell the Queen first. She might have an opinion about how it is done. So we are fully agreed about the marriage?

Ornrandir: It does seem like the logical thing to do [says the pointy-eared member of the couple].

Rowena: I’m glad we were able to work this out rationally, without the usual tawdry, emotional mess.

Ornrandir: Of course. We may be the two most intelligent people on the planet. We won’t let maudlin sentimentality distract us from rational analysis.

Rowena: Well, I am glad that that is settled. Now back to important matters - about that scroll we were discussing…

goto124
2015-02-22, 09:30 PM
Which systems allow for better social situations such as romance? Since DnD doesn't work well for it. Other than that L5Rish game already mentioned.

Forrestfire
2015-02-22, 10:18 PM
Fate is pretty good about noncombat stuff, including all sorts of social encounters.

Broken Twin
2015-02-22, 10:31 PM
Some games are entirely focused on relationships. One example I can think of offhand is Monster Hearts, which is essentially high school for monsters. The rules are built around your social connections. I've been meaning to try it, but it being a niche game inside a niche hobby means I've been having a hard time getting my current group to give it a go. Monsters And Other Childish Things also uses your relationships as part of its mechanics, but Eros love wouldn't be an option, seeing as how you play as children.

I'm not sure if any of the more standard "gather a party, fight monsters" systems have mechanics that would interact with relationships. If a anyone knows of any, I'd be interested to hear about them.

Coidzor
2015-02-22, 10:47 PM
Then I'd like to know who's been posting in my name, because this jqavins has not written that. I have written that the players are not entitled to assume there won't be STD or pregnency rolls, but not that it's the player's fault when conflicts arise.

That's the entirety of what your argument is predicated upon, though. :smallconfused: It only makes sense that you'd still be arguing against the idea that players should be told in advance if pregnancy and STD rules are going to be used if you're against the idea that players should know in advance that the DM is using pregnancy and STD rules.


I'd really like you to show me where I said anything about it being the player's fault, because I'm pretty sure I never said that.

So what was your "roleplay harder and quit crying" argument really about, then?

The Insanity
2015-02-22, 11:42 PM
So what was your "roleplay harder and quit crying" argument really about, then?
Not about this strawman that you're constructing here?

Gavran
2015-02-23, 12:41 AM
Ornrandir: Of course. It has a fleece collar, so I always have the material component for Phantasmal Force, feathers as decorations so I can fly, and several pockets worked into it here for other components. It has two internal pockets for scrolls, this hidden pocket for a dagger, and Lorelei will never figure out where the thieves’ tools are. It's green, for easy concealment in the trees. See? I carefully considered every relevant sartorial issue.

I don't think I particularly like the idea that wizards cast spells by name, and I prefer to think of material components as examples of things with the right thaumaturgical properties to invoke a specific kind of magic effect rather than ingredients in a magic recipe - but beyond that, I quite like this. And that marks the second time you've written something that I felt the need to make a reply about how I liked it.

The Glyphstone
2015-02-23, 02:34 AM
Some games are entirely focused on relationships. One example I can think of offhand is Monster Hearts, which is essentially high school for monsters. The rules are built around your social connections. I've been meaning to try it, but it being a niche game inside a niche hobby means I've been having a hard time getting my current group to give it a go. Monsters And Other Childish Things also uses your relationships as part of its mechanics, but Eros love wouldn't be an option, seeing as how you play as children.

I'm not sure if any of the more standard "gather a party, fight monsters" systems have mechanics that would interact with relationships. If a anyone knows of any, I'd be interested to hear about them.

Does Bliss Stage count? I'm not sure about the party aspect, but there are monsters and relationships are a fundamental mechanical part of character power.

Coidzor
2015-02-23, 02:46 AM
Ever played a freeform game with combat in it? It's awfully common for two players to write together in perfect harmony... up untill it comes the time to decide what happens at the end.

That's why you don't start a fight unless you're already at least roughly in agreement with the outcome, yes. And it's still skeevier for someone to go "I wanna make your character pregnant regardless of how you feel about it" than "I'm killing your character" or "your character isn't getting away from this fight without some wounding/maiming."


If you consider player conflict over game things to be something "fishy" and requiring to be solved outside of the game, you have not really agreed to play the game in the first place.

No, I consider player conflict over something they should have naturally already hashed out between them in the initial dialogue that lead to the sexual relationship between characters in the first place to be fishy, because either they somehow just didn't have that conversation as part of setup or they did have that conversation and then the person with the impregnation fetish went back on their word and tried to pull the forced pregnancy stunt.


*SIGH* No, I am not punishing people for doing stuff I don't want them to. I am, as I have said several times now, enforcing consequences of actions.

Then why was your example one of the quintessential "I'm punishing you for being stupid" DMing moves? :smallconfused:


Nature doesn't give a **** if you **** for fun, do it without protection and you can end up pregnant.

PCs can't do it with protection if the DM keeps the existence of protection a secret. Ditto for their houserules or 3rd party rules about sex. Either you disagree with me or you agree with me on this front, you can't say "I agree the DM should be clear about their rules from the get go" and then say "The DM should be able to spring surprise pregnancies on people." If the players know about the rules and what protection they can take, then pregnancy can't really be a surprise in that case.


Um, where are you getting this stuff from? Because I'm pretty sure I never said I spring surprises like this on people. I certainly don't go around doing what you accuse me of. I don't go around laying 'gotcha' traps except in dungeons.

The fact that you're arguing against me and my position that the DM needs to be upfront about it if they're going to use pregnancy rules. I've never said to never use pregnancy rules, so you can't be arguing against me on that front, after all.

I must confess, I'm confused as to what you think my position is and what your position actually is then, if you're against DMs springing rules on players by surprise.


Why are people so damned surprised that sex without contraceptives might end up in pregnancies?

I'm not. As far as I've read everyone else who is against DMs springing surprise pregnancies on players, the majority of us are also not against unprotected sex leading to pregnancies... provided that protection exists and isn't being kept secret by the DM. If they're deadset against there not being protection and there's no good reason for their position, then we go back into the other areas where they're clearly trying to punish players instead of just keeping up with the versimiltude joneses.


Not about this strawman that you're constructing here?

So what were you actually disapproving of, then, seeing as how you left your statement's interpretation up to the rest of us and don't much like what you got.

BWR
2015-02-23, 03:56 AM
Then why was your example one of the quintessential "I'm punishing you for being stupid" DMing moves? :smallconfused:

Because it isn't punishment! How many times do I have to repeat myself? It isn't punishment if actions have consequences. A punishment would be giving them xp penalties for being stupid. A punishment would be randomly throwing out damage with no source because I didn't like what they were doing. Punishment would be "a bullet kills you" when you do something the DM doesn't like (we've had this done to us). Punishment is not having the world react appropriately to PC actions.
Or do you consider anything that happens to PCs that isn't some sort of xp or treasure reward to be punishment? Is failing a saving throw against a hostile spell punishing the players?



PCs can't do it with protection if the DM keeps the existence of protection a secret. Ditto for their houserules or 3rd party rules about sex. Either you disagree with me or you agree with me on this front, you can't say "I agree the DM should be clear about their rules from the get go" and then say "The DM should be able to spring surprise pregnancies on people." If the players know about the rules and what protection they can take, then pregnancy can't really be a surprise in that case.
.

Where do you get the idea that I keep these things secret? You seem to be reading a lot more into what I've said than I actually said. There are tons of things we don't actually tell our players about the game world because we can't spend the rest of our lives enumerating every single rule and interaction that is possible. You just assume that it works mostly the same way as it does IRL. You don't bother telling people that gravity, or some fantasy version of it, exists. You don't bother telling people that poison is bad for you. The rules aren't there to tell you that poison or falling damage exists, they're there to tell you how this interacts with your character. Keeping things secret would be not only not volunteering the information but not giving it up upon being asked. Anyone who asks about things like this will get a proper answer.
A surprise pregnancy would be "you're pregnant" "how? this character has never had sex" "mysteeeeerious".
Having unprotected sex and getting someone pregnant is not surprise unless you are very ignorant (and no, none of my players or their PCs are unaware of how babies are made).

There is nothing secret going on here. Please try to understand this.




The fact that you're arguing against me and my position that the DM needs to be upfront about it if they're going to use pregnancy rules. I've never said to never use pregnancy rules, so you can't be arguing against me on that front, after all. .

These aren't surprise rules! They are there if people ask and they usually don't. You know why? Because they know what possible consequences of sex are! They don't have to be told like ignorant children.



I must confess, I'm confused as to what you think my position is and what your position actually is then, if you're against DMs springing rules on players by surprise.

It seems to me you assume that people have to be told about absolutely everything beforehand, however inconsequential, however natural. Do you tell people their characters need to defecate? Or sleep? Or eat? No, because these are assumed. Likewise, I and everyone I play with assumes that unless specifically noted otherwise, having unprotected sex might result in children.
The rules, as I said before, aren't there to tell you that things like needing food and sleep to survive exist, they are there to determine how these elements directly interact with the world. They are there to make bookkeeping easier and avoid arguments.




I'm not. As far as I've read everyone else who is against DMs springing surprise pregnancies on players, the majority of us are also not against unprotected sex leading to pregnancies... provided that protection exists and isn't being kept secret by the DM. If they're deadset against there not being protection and there's no good reason for their position, then we go back into the other areas where they're clearly trying to punish players instead of just keeping up with the versimiltude joneses.

So if protection exists, unprotected sex leading to pregnancy is fine, but if protection doesn't exist sex shouldn't lead to pregnancy? Am I reading that right?

And again there is this word 'punishment'. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if we use the word differently.
To say it AGAIN, having the world react appropriately to actions is not punishment. Having someone get angry because you spit in their face is not a punishment. Having a cat purr because you stroke it is equally much a punishment. Having characters feel really good during sex is just as much a punishment as having people get pregnant after sex. These are CONSEQUENCES!

And with that I am bowing out of this mess because I have the feeling we will never convince each other that the other is doing it wrong.

goto124
2015-02-23, 04:45 AM
So someone here is in a group that feels STDs and pregnancy are consequences as normal as getting burned for putting a hand in a fire. And there are other people here who feel STDs and pregnancy are akin to dysentry for not bothering with hygiene.

Is it safe to say that most groups will assume realistic consquences for sex are not a thing in tabletops, and the DM should just tell the players beforehand if said DM wants to run otherwise, because clash of expectations?

The DM may think the players are childish, but- okay, I think he meant that players should be mature enough to know pregnancy happens in a game, and players who think otherwise are childish. Which may not even be true, but I'll leave this argument to someone else.

Pregnancy rules are house rules. All house rules should be explicitly made clear by the DM, even if nothing to do with sex. This spell is banned, or that skill deals less damage that RAW? Let the players know.

jqavins
2015-02-23, 08:50 AM
That's the entirety of what your argument is predicated upon, though. :smallconfused: It only makes sense that you'd still be arguing against the idea that players should be told in advance if pregnancy and STD rules are going to be used if you're against the idea that players should know in advance that the DM is using pregnancy and STD rules.
What I'm against are two things: 1) that not having these rules is the only correct default, players are entitled to assume sex is consequence-free unless explicitly told otherwise even though lots of other things are assumed to have consequences despite not being in the RAW, etc.; and 2) the assumption that a GM who does use STD or pregnency rules without saying so first is always, in every case, out to get players who deviate from said GMs vision of the game.

What I'm for is agreement ahead of time on important questions. But that isn't always done, which can lead to conflicting assumptions. Conflicting assumptions are virtually never exclusively one party's or the other's fault; they can be only if one of the assumptions is unassailably the right one, and that is not the case here. The unchecked assumption that leads a GM to implement such rules could be any one of a bunch of things, most likely not that the players should "stick to the script." Most of the time a disagreement of this sort stems from a mistake and nothing more.

TheCountAlucard
2015-02-23, 09:03 AM
Just like in the thread about never statting gods, the use of declarative absolutes is the problem, not pregnancy rules (or lack thereof) or GM malevolence (or lack thereof).

jqavins
2015-02-23, 09:25 AM
So someone here is in a group that feels STDs and pregnancy are consequences as normal as getting burned for putting a hand in a fire.
Not as much inevitable, but natural, yes.


And there are other people here who feel STDs and pregnancy are akin to dysentry for not bothering with hygiene.
Yes, that's fair. There is a key difference, though. We assume that characters are not neglecting hygiene unless stated otherwise, and we assume that characters are not having sex unless stated otherwise. If characters overtly choose to neglect hygiene or are somehow forced to neglect it, then rolls for for disease would be appropriate even though they are not in the RAW, and it would be incumbant on the GM to make something up. When someone overtly chooses to have sex (or is somehow forced to, but we virtually never go there) it is better if there is agreement within the grout ahead of time as to whether or not there will be rolls. Still, in the absence of such agreement, the GM is not automatically in the wrong for making the decision that there will be, even though it's not in the RAW, and making something up. The GM can be acting reasonably, even if the decision turns out to be the wrong one. (And, depending on the group, that could very well be the right one.)


Is it safe to say that most groups will assume realistic consquences for sex are not a thing in tabletops, and the DM should just tell the players beforehand if said DM wants to run otherwise, because clash of expectations?
No. It's better to come to an agreement before hand, but it is not safe to assume. Nor is it any more right to assume there are no realistic consequences than it is to assume there are.


Pregnancy rules are house rules. All house rules should be explicitly made clear by the DM, even if nothing to do with sex. This spell is banned, or that skill deals less damage that RAW? Let the players know.
Really, though, lots of house rules grow out of spontaneous rulings on things no one thought about ahead of time. "How much damage can I do with a blow gun?" "Hmm, I can't find it in the DMG; let's say the damage is the same as a thrown dart, but it has a longer range." Now it's a house rule; now it should be added to the weapons list explicitly. But that first time it was "sprung" on the players. Spontaneous rulings are a big part of the GMs job; he may not always get them right, but he's still supposed to make them.

johnbragg
2015-02-23, 10:06 AM
There is a key difference, though. We assume that characters are not neglecting hygiene unless stated otherwise,

If you're running a campaign in anything short of Victorian steampunk, the more "realistic" assumption is bathing once-a-month, if not once-a-season. If your characters are going to a Roman-style bathhouse, they're probably just as likely to catch a disease from the filthy water than they would be from not bathing at all.


and we assume that characters are not having sex unless stated otherwise.

No, if the characters are having sex, YOU'RE assuming (or more exactly, declaring retroactively by GM fiat) that they're doing so without protection and/or contraception.


Spontaneous rulings are a big part of the GMs job; he may not always get them right, but he's still supposed to make them.

At this point we admit that you, as a GM, are making a ruling and not just expressing the ineffable What Realistically Would HAppen.
Your GM snap decision as to whether contraception/disease protection is a thing in your campaign setting should be made, at the latest, when a PC announces that they are going to have sex. It should be announced at that time, coupled with the old DM's staple, "Are you sure?" If you tell the Bard that sex with the noble they're making eyes at has a N% chance of having magical crotch rot and a M% chance of pregnancy BEFORE they do the deed, that is very different from telling them so AFTER they act.

Solaris
2015-02-23, 01:03 PM
If you're running a campaign in anything short of Victorian steampunk, the more "realistic" assumption is bathing once-a-month, if not once-a-season. If your characters are going to a Roman-style bathhouse, they're probably just as likely to catch a disease from the filthy water than they would be from not bathing at all.

Depending on how you're defining 'bathing', that's... not necessarily true.


No, if the characters are having sex, YOU'RE assuming (or more exactly, declaring retroactively by GM fiat) that they're doing so without protection and/or contraception.

I like to assume they are, unless stated otherwise. It just solves so many potential problems...


So someone here is in a group that feels STDs and pregnancy are consequences as normal as getting burned for putting a hand in a fire. And there are other people here who feel STDs and pregnancy are akin to dysentery for not bothering with hygiene.

Is it safe to say that most groups will assume realistic consquences for sex are not a thing in tabletops, and the DM should just tell the players beforehand if said DM wants to run otherwise, because clash of expectations?

The DM may think the players are childish, but- okay, I think he meant that players should be mature enough to know pregnancy happens in a game, and players who think otherwise are childish. Which may not even be true, but I'll leave this argument to someone else.

Pregnancy rules are house rules. All house rules should be explicitly made clear by the DM, even if nothing to do with sex. This spell is banned, or that skill deals less damage that RAW? Let the players know.

This.

It's painfully obvious, after everyone's explained themselves as best they can, we're not going to convince each other. What I think we can agree on, however, is that the DM and players need to be having conversations with each other beforehand and that this is one area where the DM needs to listen to the players and their expectations far more than he needs to listen to his own desires for verisimilitude (or the lack thereof) on account of the intimate nature of the consequences. (Which isn't to say that the DM can't ban it outright; he is, after all, going to be playing the NPCs the characters might be seducing.)

Electrohydra
2015-02-24, 05:38 PM
So I mostly skimmed over the end of this thread, but I think there's an interesting tibit that we can relate to the question from the 3.5 DMG. Specifically...


It’s no fun losing a long-
term character who gets run over by a cart. A good rule of thumb
is that a character shouldn’t die in a trivial way because of some
fluke of the dice unless he or she was doing something really
stupid at the time.

Considering how easy it is to get resurected in D&D, a pregnancy is probably a bigger hurdle to your adventuring career then death, so IMO it falls squarely into the "Don't spring this on your players unless it's an important plot point". NPC pregnancies and STDs are probably fine depending on the mood of the game. Though you'd think that in a world where Remove Disease exists they would have gotten rid of STDs a long time ago.

Mr.Moron
2015-02-24, 05:49 PM
My general approach.

* I don't really want to RP lovin' with my buddies. It feels creepy. Doubly so with female players.
* I don't really want to RP sexin' with my buddies. Because see above, and also like ick.

However, certainly so long as it's kept a bit brushed over it's not a topic I mind at all. I usually have an idea of what NPCs might think is attractive or interesting and flirting can be noted as a bit of passing "flavor-text"

I also tend to assume that my settings have attitudes towards sex and sexuality that roughly align with my mostly-liberal modern view of the subject. Most folks aren't going to judge anyone for their behavior behind closed doors, unless they're being outlandishly aggressive or crass about it.

I also always assume that some form of birth control exists, is cheap and is so widely available and accepted as to be hand waved. No matter if this something magical in the setting, or just an area where their medicine is ahead of where ours was (assuming the setting is vaguely past-y).


There has been one exception to my general aversion to getting really deep into romance stuff. It has been interesting. The player and the NPC spent well over a year "dating" (both in-game time, and real-world time) before sealing the deal, so the whole party couldn't help but be a bit congratulatory when it finally happened.

Knaight
2015-02-24, 06:17 PM
If you're running a campaign in anything short of Victorian steampunk, the more "realistic" assumption is bathing once-a-month, if not once-a-season. If your characters are going to a Roman-style bathhouse, they're probably just as likely to catch a disease from the filthy water than they would be from not bathing at all.

Wrong. Even if we're assuming that Europe is the continent of inspiration (which is not a safe assumption), there was a long period prior to the Victorian age where bathing was way more common than that in most places. Plenty of roman bath houses were still functional, even in the early medieval period the vikings were explicitly stated to bathe at least weekly by outside observers (there's some documentation from the middle east to the effect of "they only wash a few times a week; they don't even partially wash five times a day". Outside of Europe, washing frequencies were often higher, particularly in areas which are comparatively warm (people didn't need much of an excuse to get in a river in India, south east Asia, central Africa, etc.).

Coming back to topic, pregnancy and STD rules as imposed pretty much always assume that characters don't take basic precautions that aren't explicitly stated. That's a terrible path for a game to go down, and because of it it is generally avoided. If someone says they go through a door, basically no GM insists that they explicitly say they open it first (that was stupid nonsense I saw back in elementary school when people were GMing free form games, and even then just about everyone involved knew it was pointless). Equipment maintenance is almost always glossed over. If someone takes a swing at a character, most systems will assume they defend themselves in some way, and even those that don't generally have some sort of explicit "do you block, parry, or dodge" question come up. Why should sex be the exception.

This is before we get into the context of STDs in a high fantasy setting where magical healing is ludicrously far beyond anything we have today. Any disease can be cured instantly. Missing limbs can be regenerated perfectly. Death is reversible. Meanwhile STDs generally spread comparatively slowly and with extremely limited spreading vectors. They should be comparatively easy to wipe out - we're not talking about something like measles here, which starts in some far corner of a civilization somewhere and manages to turn into an outbreak that goes across the entire thing in a season, potentially infecting about 10% of the population.

Broken Twin
2015-02-24, 08:35 PM
Does Bliss Stage count? I'm not sure about the party aspect, but there are monsters and relationships are a fundamental mechanical part of character power.

Huh, haven't heard of that one before. Seems like an interesting take on the concept, but not precisely what I was thinking about. Something where your bonds with other characters affected the game, but as an aspect of the game, not as the primary component. That probably doesn't make much sense, I seem to be having trouble formulating exactly what I mean.

goto124
2015-02-24, 08:42 PM
"You caught... something from the barmaid. Don't worry, it's not much worse than a rash and a -1 to Cha checks. Just find a discreet cleric.'

I can see some groups having a good laugh over it.

johnbragg
2015-02-24, 09:07 PM
"You caught... something from the barmaid. Don't worry, it's not much worse than a rash and a -1 to Cha checks. Just find a discreet cleric.'

I can see some groups having a good laugh over it.

Yes. There are a range of situations. On one end, PCs going whoring with nameless tavern wenches, making a fort save vs crotch stirges is par for the course, and either remove disease is available when the party cleric prepares spells, or at a nearby temple for a minimal fraction of character wealth. On the other end, when a PC seduces a plot-relevant NPC, or consummates a romance with another PC or NPC, doing that is pretty terrible.

Jacob.Tyr
2015-02-25, 12:03 AM
I used to be okay with it in gaming, never at the table but in some online games and as asides downtime etc. It was just part of who/what my character was, so I didn't break character.

In my naivete, I didn't realize pretty much all of the other people involved were masturbating to the interactions. Sort of ruined it for me. Fade-To-Black for the win.

jqavins
2015-02-25, 09:08 AM
This is before we get into the context of STDs in a high fantasy setting where magical healing is ludicrously far beyond anything we have today. Any disease can be cured instantly. Missing limbs can be regenerated perfectly. Death is reversible. Meanwhile STDs generally spread comparatively slowly and with extremely limited spreading vectors. They should be comparatively easy to wipe out.
I'm all in favor of dropping the STD and pregnancy discussion mostly, but I have to address this, which has been mentioned a few times now. Remove Disease is a thrid level spell and therefore requires a minimum fifth level caster. That means, if one doesn't have a fifth level or higher cleric, ranger, or druid as a friend or ally, one should expect to pay at least 150 gp to have it done. While that's somewhere in the range of a small but noticable expense to a trivial pittance for most PCs, it is a small fortune and completely out of reach for most of the population. This magic is extant, but not widely available, so it is a mistake to suppose that diseases, such as good old syphilis and gonorrhea, are wiped out of the population at large. Good medicine is for the rich. Gee, how time have changed.:smallmad:

Sith_Happens
2015-02-25, 09:52 AM
I've done this to PCs.

So has one of my current DMs. It resulted in the retirement of a character whose player until that moment was having a blast playing her and whom the entire group adored both in and out of character. The party dynamic just hasn't been the same since.


I remember once in a D&D game I ran, the team ranger and favored soul got it on in a private room after both got stupidly drunk. The favored soul was like "Let's roll to see how much fun we have!" and she got a natural 20. The ranger by contrast rolled a 3. Then the cleric and archer both rolled 4d6 'Fatigue damage due to the noise overnight in the room next door' damage and they all roleplayed the morning after respectively, with the favored soul having a huge grin the entire morning, the archer and cleric sharing a mug of coffee laced with Advil, and the ranger having no memory of the past 12 hours.

As DM I had this 'deer in headlights' thing for a solid 10 minutes... And then awarded everyone 500 xp each for Roleplaying.

This sort of thing happens roughly every other session in my current group, though not always PC-on-PC. It's amusing to say the least.:smallamused:


Request to turn this thread into 'Funny Sex- or Romance- related Moments in your Campaign'.

Funny thing: This is actually at least half of what the thread is supposed to be about.:smallsigh:


*sigh*
Std? Cure disease

Unwanted pregnancy?
Cure disease

Problem solved!

Fixed that for you. When Remove Disease is capable of aborting every possible "monster" that one might get impregnated/implanted with due to a bad roll, what makes you think it somehow can't do the same to humanoids?:smallwink:


Hey, folks! Have you ever wondered why RPGs are still a primarily male-dominated hobby, and RPG players have a reputation of being creepy neckbeards? Read this thread, realize that apparently "don't drop an unplanned pregnancy on your female PCs unless you know in advance the players are okay with it" is a controversial statement that evokes mixed reaction, instead of a single-voiced "well duh, the alternative is incredibly creepy", and wonder no more!

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2014/003/e/1/he_s_right_you_know_by_nightdemon12-d70r777.jpg


I think my favorite part is that the people who want to assume consequences are the ones who apparently don't want to follow up on that. You have alchemical wonders that put real world medicine to shame, but apparently you can't imagine them having access to a literally magical contraception drug, or a magic device that functions similarly. People can fling fire from their fingertips, you want them to have to think about STIs, pregnancy and the like, but magical countermeasures are just a foreign thing nobody has thought of before the PCs. Because 'realism'. Yep. That sure is 'realistic'. I really hope you all roll for every mundane disease under the sun. I'd hate to think that suddenly mundane real world problems are primarily only relevant when women are involved.


Do you also roll for whether drunk drivers hit you on the street or loose shingles falling from roofs?


Really, why are people so caught up on the consequences of sex and not the dangers of improper hygiene? A lot more people died of dysentery, not to mention countless other diseases, from poor hygiene and improperly kept latrines than STIs, yet that is trivial while the dangers of sex are vitally important.


What you are missing is the inherent malice in "sorry, dragons can fly, wizards can shoot fire, the periodic table has four elements plus a hotly debated fifth "Aether" element, and there's all sorts of magic and hand-waving of realism, but I am going to keep throwing petty hurdles at you that keep you from playing in dungeons and fightig with dragons because realism".

Why doesn't the barbarian have the runs from all that alcoholism? Why doesn't he get the shakes when we're two days in the wild and he's not had his daily gallon? Why isn't the dwarf taking penalties for eating all that garbage on a dare but somehow 'morning sickness' makes me useless? Why can the Druid live on literal swamp water and caught rats without indigestion but I have to worry about bloating?

Same goes for disease. Fighter can dice in a filthy, live ridden warren with other folks who haven bathed this season, who squat in their own feces and have no idea how hygiene works, who squeeze through muck and past rats to get to their secret gambling dens, and come out looking like a He-Man placard for a toy ad, but heaven forbid somethin as interesting in a game as romance not lead to rolls to see if I develop a burning sensation or some form of aboleth mucus?

...

I have to worry about a yeast infection? You need to worry about PTSD. It's only fair, right? Realism.

...

Because you are taking something said in brief, and blowing it up, scrutinizing it, only allowing the possible negative aspects (forced retirement from the game, forced social issues, etc.) and denying any of the benefits.

You don't develop an unsightly itch from not having TP in a dungeon. You don't need to worry about people tracking you by your pee puddles in corners. You don't need to make sure you ingest the prose calories. You don't suffer scurvy for living entirely on rations, nor do you suffer protein starvation for only ever hunting animals for meat all the time. You don't walk around in greasy unwashed clothes because you forget to say you bought soap. You don't die of disease because you cut your steak with the same knife that went into the carrion crawler's guts last week. You don't toss and turn on an unfamiliar mattress. You don't wake up in a panic with every unfamiliar noise. You don't ever have nightmares or dreams.

But sex? My! That's different for no reason! Totally needs detailed examination and consequences. Can't just be hand waved as 'handled well' like everything above.


This is completely untrue in a universe controlled by a conscious mind with free will. If there are pregnancy rules, or STD disease rules in your campaign, YOU PUT THEM THERE! How can you turn around and shrug, "hey, it's not a punishment, it's just a possible outcome of your actions?" Especially when it's entirely plausible to handwave magical precautions against that sort of thing, or handwave a sort of "herd immunity" given the availability of cure disease spells.

http://media.giphy.com/media/n5oYbKrHYXylq/giphy.gif
http://gifrific.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hogwarts-clap.gif
http://25.media.tumblr.com/1d03f638cb43e6d38fdf04210591998b/tumblr_moac0l70Es1soks1io1_400.gif


[Snip]

One of my favorite things about forums: You can keep going on and on about "realism" while carefully quoting every post in the thread except the ones calling you out for picking a single, specific element of "reality" to enforce while still handwaving countless others that make much more sense to in multiple ways to enforce instead or additionally.


Show of hands, who here thinks it's okay to use Mage's Disjunction on the players without making sure the players are okay with it beforehand!

Funny thing: You're not going to see many hands on that question. Why? Because getting Disjunctioned is, within the context of the game, a Fate Worse Than Death (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FateWorseThanDeath). One spell cast on you and some bad Will save rolls later and your character is now functionally unplayable for some gross amount of both in-universe and real-life time, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.

Unplanned (in the OOC sense) pregnancy? Same thing. Not every campaign can have a nine month timeskip on demand, in which case a pregnant character probably needs to be replaced and may or may not ever (from an out-of-game perspective) be able to come back. All because the DM was too anal to just assume that the PCs pay roughly as much attention to sex safety as they do to food safety.


In a recent 2E game, my character was Ornrandir, a male elven mage/thief, given the title of the Earl of Devon by the king. He was an outcast orphan who had only recently formed any attachments to anybody. I had played him as emotionally undeveloped but brilliant. My wife was playing Rowena, a female human wizard, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had been in an ivory tower (literally) studying magic since she was a child. She played her as an extreme nerd. The royalty had started leaning on us to make political marriages, which is to say that the DM wanted to do some political intrigue. We decided to trump the whole romantic process and sent the following email to the entire gaming group.

A situation has occurred. It will affect the party to some extent, so I guess you should all hear about it. The two of us decided to explain it to you in character, so here it is.

(You may ignore which account this email came from; it was written by the two of us together.)
-----------------------

Rowena has been traveling to Devon Manor regularly to do magical research stuff and help set up the schools there, make scrolls, etc. The next time she visits after a Certain Conversation with the Queen, once she and Ornrandir are alone in the study where they work together on magic, she initiates the following conversation:

Rowena: The Queen tells me I really ought to give some thought to perpetuating magical bloodlines and recommends I consider marrying you.

Ornrandir: I’ve heard similar rumblings. Countess Elanor told me I have to find someone to marry, too. Something about an heir for the county.

Rowena: It is a rational idea. It is just that I have never really considered it before. I have been rather busy learning magic; all that physical stuff seemed so…worldly.

Ornrandir: I certainly know little about it. I’ve never had any family, and I've been an outcast all my life, except for those occasions when the only female I’ve traveled with was Lorelei, the paladin.

Rowena: The gaggle of giggling girls I must spend time with these days seems so focused on the idea.

Ornrandir: I know. Everyone but you is so stupid.

Rowena: I am already spending a lot of time here anyway.

Ornrandir: My servants wouldn’t have to prepare separate rooms for you each time. That would be convenient. And we seem able to get along.

Rowena: After all, we worked well together blasting hundreds of goblins with lightning bolts.

Ornrandir: I enjoyed casting coordinated lightning bolts with you. I’ve never felt so connected to another person before.

Rowena: After that, how difficult could this marriage thing be?

Ornrandir: Love is one of the strongest and most mysterious forces of the universe. Of course, controlling arcane cosmic forces is what wizards do. Maybe we should research a spell for it?

Rowena: As a mage, I will not age as quickly as normals; being elven, you of course will not age at all, so I really do not see why we need to be in a big hurry. And why should I care about being considered – how did she put it? Oh, yes – an "old maid".

Ornrandir: That seems like a meaningless phrase. Everybody becomes old, and an unmarried woman is of course a maid.

Rowena: On the other hand, your life expectancy, given your penchant for getting into trouble, isn’t exactly eternal. [looks him up and down appraisingly] At least if I marry you, you won’t keep getting ripped off by the tailors. You paid far too much for that rag you’re wearing.

Ornrandir: Fine by me. I’d be happy not to have to think about clothes any more.

Rowena: You thought about … that?

Ornrandir: Of course. It has a fleece collar, so I always have the material component for Phantasmal Force, feathers as decorations so I can fly, and several pockets worked into it here for other components. It has two internal pockets for scrolls, this hidden pocket for a dagger, and Lorelei will never figure out where the thieves’ tools are. It's green, for easy concealment in the trees. See? I carefully considered every relevant sartorial issue.

Rowena: I see. Yes, I believe I should take over those decisions. [Pause.] I would prefer to avoid that spectacle that Aduphus went through to marry Lady Stanley. The collective intelligence of her Majesty’s ladies dropped like a stone the instant someone said, “wedding”, and all they could talk about for weeks was fripperies and lace. Why do you think I spent so much time here writing out scrolls?

Ornrandir: Believe me, I understand. Since I developed the gold and mithril mines, all the nobles have been throwing their daughters at me. A year earlier they were offended that I was allowed to carry a weapon, and now they want me to sheathe one in their daughters.

Rowena: So how quickly can we get this over with?

Ornrandir: Well, when they assigned us to go fetch the Prince, we started out on the task immediately. Is the priest available today?

Rowena: I suppose we need to tell the Queen first. She might have an opinion about how it is done. So we are fully agreed about the marriage?

Ornrandir: It does seem like the logical thing to do [says the pointy-eared member of the couple].

Rowena: I’m glad we were able to work this out rationally, without the usual tawdry, emotional mess.

Ornrandir: Of course. We may be the two most intelligent people on the planet. We won’t let maudlin sentimentality distract us from rational analysis.

Rowena: Well, I am glad that that is settled. Now back to important matters - about that scroll we were discussing…

I remember this story from another thread a while back. It's just as entertaining of a read now as it was then.:smallcool:


These aren't surprise rules!

If you can't give me a page citation for the rules in question then they are in fact of the "surprise" variety. That is by definition.


They don't have to be told like ignorant children.

Calling your players ignorant children for not divining the houserules you didn't tell them is a great way to never see them again, FYI.


Do you tell people their characters need to defecate? Or sleep? Or eat? No, because these are assumed.

Do you make your players tell you that their characters wipe their asses after defecating? Or sleep somewhere other than where they defecated? Or defecate someplace other than in their food? No, because these are assumed.

So why can't you also assume that when they knock boots with someone they in fact use the protection they likely have trivial access to?


The rules, as I said before, aren't there to tell you that things like needing food and sleep to survive exist, they are there to determine how these elements directly interact with the world. They are there to make bookkeeping easier and avoid arguments.

Adding rules for unprotected sex, on the other hand, makes bookkeeping harder and causes arguments. Not to mention that the particular game you've mostly been arguing with respect to does in fact have rules telling you that you need food and sleep.

Knaight
2015-02-25, 12:21 PM
I'm all in favor of dropping the STD and pregnancy discussion mostly, but I have to address this, which has been mentioned a few times now. Remove Disease is a thrid level spell and therefore requires a minimum fifth level caster. That means, if one doesn't have a fifth level or higher cleric, ranger, or druid as a friend or ally, one should expect to pay at least 150 gp to have it done. While that's somewhere in the range of a small but noticable expense to a trivial pittance for most PCs, it is a small fortune and completely out of reach for most of the population. This magic is extant, but not widely available, so it is a mistake to suppose that diseases, such as good old syphilis and gonorrhea, are wiped out of the population at large. Good medicine is for the rich. Gee, how time have changed.:smallmad:

The costs paid to hire a spell caster to cast a particular spell for you aren't necessarily indicative of the costs paid in general. I'd expect a good god of healing with priests with magical easy healing to have temples which distribute healing as one of their standard functions - at least to the populace around them. Heck, multiple D&D settings have an explicit god or goddess of love, I'd imagine some of their temples are also providing some degree of disease removal.

Solaris
2015-02-25, 12:56 PM
The costs paid to hire a spell caster to cast a particular spell for you aren't necessarily indicative of the costs paid in general. I'd expect a good god of healing with priests with magical easy healing to have temples which distribute healing as one of their standard functions - at least to the populace around them. Heck, multiple D&D settings have an explicit god or goddess of love, I'd imagine some of their temples are also providing some degree of disease removal.

I always took those as the cost for player characters to have them cast; the notion that a cleric might have the ability to stamp out some form of suffering, neglect to do so because the sufferers simply lack the funds, and retain a good alignment boggles my mind.

Arbane
2015-02-25, 07:38 PM
In a recent 2E game, my character was Ornrandir, a male elven mage/thief, given the title of the Earl of Devon by the king. He was an outcast orphan who had only recently formed any attachments to anybody. I had played him as emotionally undeveloped but brilliant. My wife was playing Rowena, a female human wizard, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She had been in an ivory tower (literally) studying magic since she was a child. She played her as an extreme nerd. The royalty had started leaning on us to make political marriages, which is to say that the DM wanted to do some political intrigue. We decided to trump the whole romantic process and sent the following email to the entire gaming group.
(SNIP)

That was hilarious. I didn't even know Jane Austen was still alive, much less playing RPGs.


I'm not sure if any of the more standard "gather a party, fight monsters" systems have mechanics that would interact with relationships. If a anyone knows of any, I'd be interested to hear about them.

Legends of the Wulin isn't a typical monster fighting game (it's about kung-fu battles), but it's got a system where emotional drives (loving someone, but hating their parent, for example) can have some fairly hefty effects on the character. (Short form - for 'bad' effects, you get a penalty for not RPing along with them, for 'good' effects, you get a stat bonus or even extra XP for going along with it.)


If you're running a campaign in anything short of Victorian steampunk, the more "realistic" assumption is bathing once-a-month, if not once-a-season. If your characters are going to a Roman-style bathhouse, they're probably just as likely to catch a disease from the filthy water than they would be from not bathing at all.

This is not even remotely historically accurate. At least not for elves, who everyone knows are famous for bathing regularly. And GMs generally don't force their PCs to "wallow in the lovely filth" of medieval squalor anyway, why start now?


I also always assume that some form of birth control exists, is cheap and is so widely available and accepted as to be hand waved. No matter if this something magical in the setting, or just an area where their medicine is ahead of where ours was (assuming the setting is vaguely past-y).

I know Pathfinder and Exalted both have easy-to-get contraceptives in-setting. (Oddly, they're both tea.)


"You caught... something from the barmaid. Don't worry, it's not much worse than a rash and a -1 to Cha checks. Just find a discreet cleric.'

I can see some groups having a good laugh over it.

Our group's biggest skirt-chaser is the monk. He's getting the most out of the immunity to disease, that's for sure...


I always took those as the cost for player characters to have them cast; the notion that a cleric might have the ability to stamp out some form of suffering, neglect to do so because the sufferers simply lack the funds, and retain a good alignment boggles my mind.

Agreed.

One little setting detail I plan to put into any PF game I run is a mob of beggars and supplicants at a healing god's temples - at the end of the day, they hold a lottery to heal people with any left-over spells.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 01:28 AM
One of my favorite things about forums: You can keep going on and on about "realism" while carefully quoting every post in the thread except the ones calling you out for picking a single, specific element of "reality" to enforce while still handwaving countless others that make much more sense to in multiple ways to enforce instead or additionally. Because many people consider these kinds of arguments threadcrapping.

Not that I do. That's just what I've been told whenever I make these kind of arguments myself.


I think my favorite part is that the people who want to assume consequences are the ones who apparently don't want to follow up on that. You have alchemical wonders that put real world medicine to shame, but apparently you can't imagine them having access to a literally magical contraception drug, or a magic device that functions similarly. People can fling fire from their fingertips, you want them to have to think about STIs, pregnancy and the like, but magical countermeasures are just a foreign thing nobody has thought of before the PCs. Because 'realism'. Yep. That sure is 'realistic'. I really hope you all roll for every mundane disease under the sun. I'd hate to think that suddenly mundane real world problems are primarily only relevant when women are involved.
This is completely untrue in a universe controlled by a conscious mind with free will. If there are pregnancy rules, or STD disease rules in your campaign, YOU PUT THEM THERE! How can you turn around and shrug, "hey, it's not a punishment, it's just a possible outcome of your actions?" Especially when it's entirely plausible to handwave magical precautions against that sort of thing, or handwave a sort of "herd immunity" given the availability of cure disease spells. Fantasy roleplaying games blatantly overlook and skirt the implication of magic anyway. As a previous thread pointed out, how do precious metals have value as currency in a world where wizards can flood markets with their magic? And how could economies even form in the resulting chaos? How does disease even persist in a world where the cure is a cleric away? How does starvation persist, when those same clerics can summon food out of thin air?

So as a caution, if you're gunna counter an argument with "Consistency much?" and hold any water, make sure you are willing to accept the implications of the consistency of your own. Magic could be a solution to numerous problems, so if you wanna argue that magic could cover an issue, remember that by your own argument you must let that cat fully out of the bag.


So has one of my current DMs. It resulted in the retirement of a character whose player until that moment was having a blast playing her and whom the entire group adored both in and out of character. The party dynamic just hasn't been the same since. Can someone please tell me why there is a blanket assumption that pregnant PCs can't just continue what they're doing? If Mummy Rot can not take a player out of contention, why can a pregnancy? I mean, if we're gunna argue for consistency here, why can't a wizard make no issue pregnancies? Or instantaneous ones? Or, I don't know, abortions?


*sigh*
Std? Cure disease

Unwanted pregnancy?
Finger of death

Problem solved! As a former unwanted pregnancy, I take offense to this. :smallmad:


If you're running a campaign in anything short of Victorian steampunk, the more "realistic" assumption is bathing once-a-month, if not once-a-season. If your characters are going to a Roman-style bathhouse, they're probably just as likely to catch a disease from the filthy water than they would be from not bathing at all. Roman bathhouses, and the complex waterworks which fed them, generally decreased disease, rather than spread it.


I always took those as the cost for player characters to have them cast; the notion that a cleric might have the ability to stamp out some form of suffering, neglect to do so because the sufferers simply lack the funds, and retain a good alignment boggles my mind. The idea that economic factors are so often considered breaches of moral obligation boggles my mind. If you are a cleric who follows a deity of healing, you have to make a living someway. Unless your deity magically provides all for you.

Arbane
2015-02-26, 04:57 AM
As a former unwanted pregnancy, I take offense to this. :smallmad:


Historically, the usual alternative to abortion was infanticide.
(Quite often, in the form of abandoning the baby on a hillside, and leaving their fate 'up to the gods'.)

As it happens, this is somewhat relevant to the campaign I'm currently in - we rescued a friend of one of the PCs from a depraved monk who'd been kidnapping women... and she's pregnant.

goto124
2015-02-26, 05:48 AM
The good news is, if you find it personally too squicky for you due to past RL experience, tell the DM and he/she will respect your opinion and avoid the topic (assuming a not-jerk DM, in which case you should leave anyway). That's the gret thing about small groups- individual DMs can adjust to fit each group's preferences and boundaries, which can vary widely from group to group. Some don't like sex to be treated trivially, or at all, it's all okay.

johnbragg
2015-02-26, 07:26 AM
Roman bathhouses, and the complex waterworks which fed them, generally decreased disease, rather than spread it.

Roman public works and sanitation, as a whole, definitely decreased disease. But the bathhouses in particular, not as much.

The big advantages of Roman water-management practices were the aqueduct bringing clean water into the city, replacing the locally available river- and well-water which was contaminated over centuries of city living. Actual sewer systems were also an improvement, although most people were still using private latrines or dumping chamberpots out the window into the street.

The bathhouse, however, was a disease vector. They didn't have germ theory. You have a major slice of the population of a city sharing the same bathwater. Including the sick, because bathing was considered a form of medicine. Taking a bath with 20,000 of your closest friends is not good hygiene.

http://www.innominatesociety.com/Articles/Death%20and%20Disease%20in%20Ancient%20Rome.htm


The idea that economic factors are so often considered breaches of moral obligation boggles my mind. If you are a cleric who follows a deity of healing, you have to make a living someway. Unless your deity magically provides all for you.

"Making a living" != "charging DMG list price for services, and withholding services if payment is not possible."

Those 3rd level spell slots are expiring at the end of the day. (Yes you could scribe a scroll, but that's an up-front cost against an uncertain future payment.)
So, even from a purely mercenary perspective, there is an incentive to discount the product to a price that common people can afford.
From a propaganda perspective (which derives from the Catholic term "Propagation of the Faith" before it acquired its connotation of "Nazi/Communist lies"), curing disease when possible and necessary seems like the sort of thing a church would do for it's tithe-paying regular congregants.

Another option is to consider churches curing diseases as a public works issue. Maybe the churches are exempt from taxes in return for military service and for keeping public areas disease free, and healing the sick either for free or at a nominal cost (maybe not nominal to the peasant or artisan paying it--a week's wages is not nominal--but compared to DMG prices or to WBL).

This is way, way off thread. Sorry.

jqavins
2015-02-26, 08:59 AM
The costs paid to hire a spell caster to cast a particular spell for you aren't necessarily indicative of the costs paid in general. I'd expect a good god of healing with priests with magical easy healing to have temples which distribute healing as one of their standard functions - at least to the populace around them. Heck, multiple D&D settings have an explicit god or goddess of love, I'd imagine some of their temples are also providing some degree of disease removal.


I always took those as the cost for player characters to have them cast; the notion that a cleric might have the ability to stamp out some form of suffering, neglect to do so because the sufferers simply lack the funds, and retain a good alignment boggles my mind.
I should have specified I was talking D&D with the spell cost since the thread is more general than that, but I guess it was obvious. Stickig with D&D 3.5, the DMG's guidance (if I recall correctly) is that it should take about 13 combat encounters to go up a level. So a fifth level character should have had 52 avreage encounters in his/her paast, or the equivalent in other experiences, to reach that power. How many clerics of such level do you suppose there are? Remeber, PCs and high level NPCs are supposed to be extraordinary. The capability to cure everything exists, but not in copious supply.

The same holds for hunger, floods of gold, and the many other things that magic could fix or ruin; it could if every fifth house has an advanced mage or cleric inside, but they don't. Magic is rare. As players we're often prone to forgetting that, since half of our characters are among the rare, extraordinary casters, and our characters are usually rich enough to afford spell casting services when we need to, but the vast majority of the population, rich or poor, doesn't have a friend who can cast third level spells, nor can most of them afford to pay for one.


The idea that economic factors are so often considered breaches of moral obligation boggles my mind. If you are a cleric who follows a deity of healing, you have to make a living someway. Unless your deity magically provides all for you.
Yes, and that, too. In the RL, we have enough doctors and medicines to cure most diseases, even though not all. Can doctors who charge for their services and drug company execs who charge for their products not retain good alignments?

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 10:55 AM
No, I consider player conflict over something they should have naturally already hashed out between them in the initial dialogue that lead to the sexual relationship between characters in the first place to be fishy, because either they somehow just didn't have that conversation as part of setup or they did have that conversation and then the person with the impregnation fetish went back on their word and tried to pull the forced pregnancy stunt.

You missed the point. The game is the dialogue and the set-up, and the roll of dice is the resolution. This so you can actually get on with the damn game instead of spending nights discussing what it should or should not be!

I've never had a prep-talk that'd satisfy opinion of this forum for any tabletop game I've ran or been part of, and it's never been an issue. The only place where prep-talks like this are common for me is online, in regards to play-by-post and freeform games, in which the prep-talk is usually a bigger issue than any of the actual in-game events, often taking months of real time to solve. And you can probably tell I hate it each time when I'm forced to argue over something OOC when it characters could bloody well do it in-game. Pregnancy and having children is actually a great example of that. If two characters waffle about it, it's great drama, bring on the popcorn! Two players waffle about it? Yawn. Nothing's happening, the game's not progressing, because they're too busy contemplating their real-life hang-ups than playing the game.

Again: the dice and the GM are in the game precisely so you don't need to decide everything by compromise and consensus. So you can improvize instead of planning.


Funny thing: You're not going to see many hands on that question. Why? Because getting Disjunctioned is, within the context of the game, a Fate Worse Than Death. One spell cast on you and some bad Will save rolls later and your character is now functionally unplayable for some gross amount of both in-universe and real-life time, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.

I knew I wasn't going to get many hands - that was the whole point of the exercise. Disjunction, along with pettier stuff like getting your spellbook stolen, are among things players here consider a Big Deal, but which really aren't. Disjunction only makes a character unplayable if your definition of "playable" is "can beat equivalent-CR encounters" or some such. The characters who have most to lose from that spell are also so powerful without any items that they'd have a whole world of possibilities for adventure and action, but people would rather rely on a metagame gentlemen's agreement than actually think about it. Calling it a Fate Worse Than Death is only true because death for such characters is close to trivial. For lower level characters, it really isn't.


One of my favorite things about forums: You can keep going on and on about "realism" while carefully quoting every post in the thread except the ones calling you out for picking a single, specific element of "reality" to enforce while still handwaving countless others that make much more sense to in multiple ways to enforce instead or additionally.

That's because the whole argument is disingenuous. This thread is about sex and love, so if I'm going to talk about realism, it's going to be about sex and love. But assuming the attitude stops there is a non-sequitur, one which I tried to underline by pointing out the disease rules in AD&D. D&D has and has had surprising rules in favor of realism, even though the game as a whole is not about that. 3.x. might not have STDs and pregnancy (discounting BoEF), but it still has food, starvation, other diseases etc.

Someone here (Solaris, I think) said STDs (etc.) were removed from the game because "they don't contribute anything". The reply to that is the same as to the first one I made to Goto: they don't contribute anything because people don't allow them to, not because they would be trivial, uninteresting, or what have you. Watch any daytime soap opera or go listen to Wrathchild by Iron Maiden if you can't think of how they could add to a game.

Knaight
2015-02-26, 11:18 AM
Yes, and that, too. In the RL, we have enough doctors and medicines to cure most diseases, even though not all. Can doctors who charge for their services and drug company execs who charge for their products not retain good alignments?

We also have organizations like MSF (DWB in the US), the WHO, etc, which actively work to cure things without being directly paid. More to the point, in the context of D&D churches I'd expect something a lot closer to a tithe or tax system than just selling spell casting services most of the time - with rich, powerful people from far away being a pretty obvious exception.

Solaris
2015-02-26, 11:39 AM
The idea that economic factors are so often considered breaches of moral obligation boggles my mind. If you are a cleric who follows a deity of healing, you have to make a living someway. Unless your deity magically provides all for you.

If the priest needs hundreds of gold pieces daily, then maybe he should ratchet his opulent lifestyle down to something a little less extravagant.
I didn't say the cleric had to hand out spells for free (although that would certainly be a charitable work), only that I thought the costs that exceed the amount most peasants would ever see in a lifetime were for the PCs - who can afford it. Remember that a single 1st-level spell costs at least 10 gp, and a 3rd-level spell costs 150 gp and up. That is a huge amount of money to a peasant, who makes only a few silver a week.
Thus, it's entirely reasonable to assume that the cleric would not charge the peasantry the same prices they charge player characters. Anything from only requiring regular tithing, to an exchange of services ("I cure your leprosy, you work in my fields for a season"), to outright giving them away because that PC who came in last week dropped a couple hundred gold to get his mummy rot cured and his buddy patched up and the cleric's set for life with that kind of fortune.


Yes, and that, too. In the RL, we have enough doctors and medicines to cure most diseases, even though not all. Can doctors who charge for their services and drug company execs who charge for their products not retain good alignments?

If they got their services and medicines for the price of asking? No. No they could not maintain a good alignment for withholding them.

It's not a direct analog situation, because a cleric's cost of a spell is asking their deity/cosmic force for it. A doctor's cost factors in a lot more things than just that; medical degrees don't just grow on trees, and pharmaceuticals can be pretty expensive to manufacture. A better analogy would be watching someone drowning in a well without throwing them the line that's sitting right next to you because they can't cough up more money than they'll make in a year.

That's without going into the examples Knaight presented about medical services being provided through charity funded by other well-intentioned people.


Someone here (Solaris, I think) said STDs (etc.) were removed from the game because "they don't contribute anything". The reply to that is the same as to the first one I made to Goto: they don't contribute anything because people don't allow them to, not because they would be trivial, uninteresting, or what have you. Watch any daytime soap opera or go listen to Wrathchild by Iron Maiden if you can't think of how they could add to a game.

I'm not so sure we want to be going with daytime soap operas (ie: the second-worst sort of television after reality TV) as an example of what something can add to a game.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 02:33 PM
I find it fascinating that a world could exist with clerics that can cast disease curing spells at little to no cost to themselves, yet such disease still exist.

But I guess you could blame spellcasters.

Boost
2015-02-26, 03:02 PM
I find it fascinating that a world could exist with clerics that can cast disease curing spells at little to no cost to themselves, yet such disease still exist.

But I guess you could blame spellcasters.

This is really a matter of scale. Remove Disease is a 3rd level spell, so you'd need a 5th level divine caster to cast it. The ratio of 5th-level-clerics-to-commoners in a normal D&D city would be ridiculously small... a city with a population of around 40,000 people might only have 8 5th-level clerics in the whole city (and 16 4th-level, and 32 3rd-level, etc). If a disease broke out in that city and it affected just 1% of the city population, that's 400 people diseased, and at best 16 daily castings of Remove Disease available (maybe 20-30 castings if there's a couple of level 6 or 7 clerics around as well). The only sensible solution would be for the clerics to use mundane medical techniques for the majority of their patients, and save their precious few castings of the spell for the victims in the most dire need.

The reason temples would charge 150 gp per casting from people who can afford it (i.e. PCs) is because for every 150 gp they earn from casting a spell on a PC, they have enough money to scribe 2 more scrolls of remove disease, thus allowing them to stockpile such critical resources for future outbreaks.

Similarly, you won't see these clerics casting all their Cure Whatever Wounds spells every time a citizen stubs a toe or cuts themselves. They'd save them for critical cases--broken bones, serious accidents, etc--and tend to the other injuries in the city by means of regular bed rest and bandages.

This is also how you can rationalize it to a PC who comes to a good-aligned temple seeking healing. The good-aligned priest might say, "You're free to stay here for the next two weeks getting bed rest until you recover and we'll tend to your injuries. But if you wish for us to call on the divine power of the gods to restore your health so you can resume your graverobbing "adventures" immediately, you'll need to donate a small fee that we can use to fund more scrolls and potions to tend to the general populace during an emergency."

Solaris
2015-02-26, 03:12 PM
There's also the fact that the afflicted may not necessarily know they're afflicted until it's too late to avoid infecting more people, and that even in a modern society a lot of people hide STDs and hope they go away without treatment due to social stigma.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 03:16 PM
I'm not so sure we want to be going with daytime soap operas (ie: the second-worst sort of television after reality TV) as an example of what something can add to a game.

Hey, I can grok the dislike for them. I hated when I had to put aside my videogames when mom wanted to watch Bold and the Beautiful, and in the army I could not understand why my squad mates (and the rest of the country) were so keen on Salatut Elämät. But that's the thing - they wouldn't have so many viewers if there was no appeal to them. If I were to hold a game with pregnancy, cancer, AIDS or depression-induced suicide with themes, I could say "tonight in Salatut Elämät" (or "tonight in Twin Peaks", to use a show that's actually pretty good), and instead of controversy, I would trigger memories of characters known and loved by vast majority of potential players.

Besides, the primary inspirations for D&D, or the stories inspired by it, were hardly considered high literature at the time. Heck, people live today who consider genre fantasy to be worst drivel of all. So in that sense, disdain of soap opera elements feels a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

johnbragg
2015-02-26, 03:38 PM
This is really a matter of scale. Remove Disease is a 3rd level spell, so you'd need a 5th level divine caster to cast it. The ratio of 5th-level-clerics-to-commoners in a normal D&D city would be ridiculously small... a city with a population of around 40,000 people might only have 8 5th-level clerics in the whole city (and 16 4th-level, and 32 3rd-level, etc). If a disease broke out in that city and it affected just 1% of the city population, that's 400 people diseased, and at best 16 daily castings of Remove Disease available (maybe 20-30 castings if there's a couple of level 6 or 7 clerics around as well). The only sensible solution would be for the clerics to use mundane medical techniques for the majority of their patients, and save their precious few castings of the spell for the victims in the most dire need.


If you're using the DMG tables, a city of 40,000 is a Metropolis, with a highest-level cleric of 12 + d6, and there are four of them. For simplicity's sake, let's say we roll a 4 each time, giving us 4 16th level clerics, 8 8th level clerics, and it doesn't matter how many 4th, 2nd and 1st level clerics because they don't matter. (There are an equal number of high-level druids and adepts.)
So folks start getting plague because it's plague (flu) season. A 16th level cleric who loads up on remove disease can cast it 21 times in a day, an 8th level cleric is good for 5x. That's 82 + 40 = 122 castings from the clerics, assuming total mobilization. The druids are good for another 122 castings (why are they in the big city I don't know, but that's what the DMG says). That's 244 castings a day, every day. Plus bonus spells for any high level clerics and druids with Wisdom 16+.

Based on the numbers from the DMG, a halfway-organized city should be able to stop a plague outbreak in its tracks. Compensation is something that the the government will have to work out with the temples. Not to mention being prepared, in the form of having a wand or two of remove disease available so that the Grand High Archpatriarch isn't running around the slums healing icky poor people if that doesn't fit his or her style.

BootStrapTommy
2015-02-26, 04:18 PM
This is really a matter of scale. Remove Disease is a 3rd level spell, so you'd need a 5th level divine caster to cast it. The ratio of 5th-level-clerics-to-commoners in a normal D&D city would be ridiculously small... a city with a population of around 40,000 people might only have 8 5th-level clerics in the whole city (and 16 4th-level, and 32 3rd-level, etc). If a disease broke out in that city and it affected just 1% of the city population, that's 400 people diseased, and at best 16 daily castings of Remove Disease available (maybe 20-30 castings if there's a couple of level 6 or 7 clerics around as well). The only sensible solution would be for the clerics to use mundane medical techniques for the majority of their patients, and save their precious few castings of the spell for the victims in the most dire need.

The reason temples would charge 150 gp per casting from people who can afford it (i.e. PCs) is because for every 150 gp they earn from casting a spell on a PC, they have enough money to scribe 2 more scrolls of remove disease, thus allowing them to stockpile such critical resources for future outbreaks. I was gunna ask why a cleric would waste their precious resources then removing an STD from an adventurer whose player was too stupid to tell the DM "let's wrap this wanger"?

Though I guess the second part anwsers that question. Guess those of poor moral fiber help purge the world of disease?

Sith_Happens
2015-02-26, 04:55 PM
Can someone please tell me why there is a blanket assumption that pregnant PCs can't just continue what they're doing?

Because you can bet your ass that any DM who makes PC pregnancy an issue in the first place is going to, in fact, make it an issue. You're probably mostly (but only mostly) good for the first few months, sure, but after that it's large physical stat penalty time! Hooray!


Disjunction, along with pettier stuff like getting your spellbook stolen, are among things players here consider a Big Deal, but which really aren't.

There's a huge difference between the two. Spellbooks aren't unduly hard to get back (if merely stolen and not destroyed) or replace (if destroyed) if you've accounted for the possibility of needing to. Replacing gear of total value on par with a castle? Good luck with that.


Disjunction only makes a character unplayable if your definition of "playable" is "can beat equivalent-CR encounters" or some such. The characters who have most to lose from that spell are also so powerful without any items that they'd have a whole world of possibilities for adventure and action, but people would rather rely on a metagame gentlemen's agreement than actually think about it.

That is the typical standard for defining such, yes. Sure, the DM can rebalance future encounters to account for the loss of gear (or you as a party can seek out weaker encounters, if your DM is of the "you can expect to face whatever would logically be in a given location that you choose to explore, beatable or not" variety), but that's a pain on both sides of the screen even before taking into account that even if that Disjunction hit the whole party (which it quite likely did given the huge radius) it probably caused widely unequal losses from PC to PC due to the highly random nature of which items get nuked.


Calling it a Fate Worse Than Death is only true because death for such characters is close to trivial. For lower level characters, it really isn't.

Lower level characters are almost never getting Disjoined in the first place. It's a 9th level spell, after all.


That's because the whole argument is disingenuous. This thread is about sex and love, so if I'm going to talk about realism, it's going to be about sex and love. But assuming the attitude stops there is a non-sequitur, one which I tried to underline by pointing out the disease rules in AD&D. D&D has and has had surprising rules in favor of realism, even though the game as a whole is not about that. 3.x. might not have STDs and pregnancy (discounting BoEF), but it still has food, starvation, other diseases etc.

Which I give you credit for. My problem is with everyone else arguing for "realistic consequences," who have at least a few times specifically claimed that enforcing pregnancy and STDs is somehow on the same level of realism as handwaving all those other things.


Someone here (Solaris, I think) said STDs (etc.) were removed from the game because "they don't contribute anything". The reply to that is the same as to the first one I made to Goto: they don't contribute anything because people don't allow them to, not because they would be trivial, uninteresting, or what have you. Watch any daytime soap opera or go listen to Wrathchild by Iron Maiden if you can't think of how they could add to a game.

Oh, they definitely contribute a lot. Whether those contributions are in any way healthy to the game, on the other hand, is far too campaign-dependent to present their possibility as the default.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 05:19 PM
There's a huge difference between the two. Spellbooks aren't unduly hard to get back (if merely stolen and not destroyed) or replace (if destroyed) if you've accounted for the possibility of needing to. Replacing gear of total value on par with a castle? Good luck with that.

I very much agree that there's a difference - yet, I've seen players here treat both with equal severity. This loops back to my exchange with Flickerdart and juxtaposition between consequences of sex, rape and disjunction. "The GM is out to get me and hence a jerk!" and "Someone might get offended over this!" are really easy arguments to make, but they're rated on a continuum where at some point they cease to be legitimate concerns and turn into symptoms of being a sore loser. Disease and pregnancy are things that can be shown on prime time television these days. If sex is already on the table, they don't raise the controversy meter any higher.

EDIT: But yeah, at this point I'm just rehashing old arguments. I'm pretty sure you already understood the point, whether you agree with me or not. Thanks for the discussion. I can continue discussing how to cross Dungeounds and Dragons with Bold and the Beautiful if someone wants to, though. :smallsmile:

Talakeal
2015-02-26, 06:41 PM
One of the more uncomfortable things I had to do as a DM was come up with a hard and fast ruling about when an embryo is considered a separate character vs. part of the mother. A player came up with a scheme involving sacrificing unborn babies as some sort of magical loophole and needed a ruling as to just how old they had to be. Man that made me feel unclean.


I had a pregnancy foisted on a female character in a game of Mage one time as a result of a paradox backlash. I wasn't too pissed off OOC (in character is a different story) until I gave birth and the Storyteller took away my Destiny background as he had decided that my characters entire role in life was to serve as the vessel for the "chosen one". That pissed me off royally, and as a result I still haven't ever allowed a character in Mage to cast a spell with the potential to accrue similar levels of paradox for fear of something similar happening in the future.


For a couple years I have been wanting to play a character who is going to be pregnant for most of the campaign. She is a female dwarf warrior who was forced to leave her clan in shame when she became with child outside of marriage and took to the mercenary life. I figure that with dwarven sturdiness and long gestations I can play the character without having to retire from adventuring too quickly, but I have yet to find a DM who will allow such a character in their game.

Sith_Happens
2015-02-26, 06:41 PM
I very much agree that there's a difference - yet, I've seen players here treat both with equal severity. This loops back to my exchange with Flickerdart and juxtaposition between consequences of sex, rape and disjunction. "The GM is out to get me and hence a jerk!" and "Someone might get offended over this!" are really easy arguments to make, but they're rated on a continuum where at some point they cease to be legitimate concerns and turn into symptoms of being a sore loser. Disease and pregnancy are things that can be shown on prime time television these days. If sex is already on the table, they don't raise the controversy meter any higher.

For the most part I'm less concerned here with GMs offending/squicking out the players and more with them showing blatant disregard for both verisimilitude and the metagame consequences of their houserules. So we're really just approaching the same page from opposite directions, I think.


I can continue discussing how to cross Dungeounds and Dragons with Bold and the Beautiful if someone wants to, though. :smallsmile:

That would be entirely on topic with the OP, matter of fact.:smallwink:

EDIT:

One of the more uncomfortable things I had to do as a DM was come up with a hard and fast ruling about when an embryo is considered a separate character vs. part of the mother. A player came up with a scheme involving sacrificing unborn babies as some sort of magical loophole and needed a ruling as to just how old they had to be. Man that made me feel unclean.

That's easy. The word "babies" here is a red herring, it's obviously the "unborn" part that's actually important. Therefore if it has a full set of chromosomes it's good, no need to fuss over philosophical or metaphysical personhood at all.

The Glyphstone
2015-02-26, 07:37 PM
Great Modthulhu: Locked for review. Odds of being re-opened = low.