“Aren’t there many unhappy couples, if cross species reproduction isn’t very common?”
This question was posed tonight in my #ttrpg session. While I’m open to the concept in my homebrew, looking at for example base #dnd where we got Half-Orcs, Half-Elves and Half…-lings(?), I found the question very interesting and wanted to ask the wider community.
How do you fine folk handle to topic?
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@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs
The question makes one really huge assumption: that “couples” mostly want to reproduce and breed.
That’s not really the case. In the real world, there’s a lot of cultural pressures that push people to reproduce, but a lot of them end up being systems of oppression: someone who is pregnant or raising children suddenly has a lot less upward social mobility, and less time to do things like organize and protest
@therealfakemoot @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs
Great point for sure! So how do you handle it in your campaigns?
@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs @Illuminatus Implicit assumption: that being in a sexual relationship with someone can only be fulfilling if pregnancy is involved. Deeply heteronormative and patriarchal …
I mean, there’s some couples that really hope for kids. Presumably there’s at least one elf-human couple that hopes for a kid but never gets one.
@cstross @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs @Illuminatus
Interesting point, so how do you handle it in your campaigns?
@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs
Procreation and biological children are generally not seen as inherently superior to adoptive children. As long as inheritances are solved most of the time it doesn’t matter that much. Unless you have titles (or other stuff) passed down “by blood”. So there is no shame in adopting, no accusation of being “lesser” parents.
Let the loving parents, no matter the biology, adopt and have that happy core family.
Or do magic.
Just asking for clarification. Is the issue that cross-species relations seldom produce offspring? So there’s a lot of couples out there that can’t have children and are therefore sad?
@Ashyr As far as I understood it, it was mainly about those couples that would like to have children but cannot due to cross species issues - if such limits so exist.
I’d say “yeah, there probably are” and then you get to come up with whatever the result of that is.
Maybe it’s a cultural norm to adopt an orphan in those scenarios 🤷
@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs I can only really say that for my part, in my setting of Enrathe, humans, “orcs”, “elves”, and “dwarves” are actually all the same species who diversified long ago into different cultures, and “halflings” don’t exist.
Generally I tend to say that crossbreeding doesn’t happen without magic (for example, I once ran a draconic sorcerer who wanted to find a way to continue the magic bloodline without running risk of creating chimeric hybrids that suffered from terrible health problems incurred by hybridizing random species, and his eventual solution was to make a potion that would cause him to only pass on his Sorcery, with the children being the exact same species as the mother).
Adoption is a pretty easy way around that though. A lot of couples DO want kids and that’s fine (especially in fantasy settings where having a large family might just be a lot more normal). And given the levels of carnage that can happen over course of a campaign, there are probably plenty of orphans around from the latest catastrophic event.
Or you can always just get a surrogate.
Honestly depending on the nature of the relationship, if one member is significantly longer-lived than the other and they want to raise a child, then the adoption/surrogate thing might even be chosen over regular crossbreeding just so that the long-life parent doesn’t have to outlive their child.
And hey, if you can’t conceive naturally, you can fuck as recklessly as you like as often as you like@Imperor @dndhomebrew @[email protected] @[email protected] @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs
In D&D I assume that most species just don’t cross. The half-somethings are the weird exceptions, which is why we have stats for those.
This is entirely a practical decision, though. If I were running a fantasy game in a more flexible system I’d entertain all kinds of interesting character origins. I’m just not willing to try and fit the square peg of D&D into the round hole of stuff that game does poorly.
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