The Benefits and Perils of Sex

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Rupert

That's actually Low-Tech Companion I you're giving references from, not LT itself.

LTC1 says that you roll vs. 6 or less for conception in any month that includes appropriate sexual activity. (I originally considered making it HT-4, but that gave too high a probability for a lot of PCs—too high by standards of realism, let alone narrative convenience.) Various low-tech contraceptive measures subtract 1, 2, or 3 from that number; for example, silphium gives -3, or an expected one pregnancy per 18 years.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Purple Snit

I don't worry about it - it's not something that my play groups have ever been interested in pursuing. No female player I know wants their character to get pregnant due to a random GM roll, and putting unplanned kids in the wake of the male ones just wouldn't work for my gaming style. The rules in LT1 looked reasonable if you really want to deal with the whole subject realistically, but unless it's a focus of your game, and is going to add something to the stories you are telling, it doesn't seem like something to give too much thought to. Certainly, random rolls for "horrible genetic mutations" seems excessive.

As a minor note, the sex of the player isn't the issue I consider; I wouldn't have a male character risk pregnancy because his player was a woman, or a female character be unable to get pregnant because her player was a man. And both of those have come up fairly often in my campaigns. In my current fantasy campaign, for example, I started out with a man playing a male character, a man playing a female character who had pretended to be male in the past, a woman playing a female character, a woman playing a female character who was currently pretending to be male, and a woman playing a male character.

I do often consider the probability of pregnancy in my campaigns, if they're premodern campaigns without reliable contraception. However, this may be influence by magic or other exotic/supernatural effects. In my current campaign, the player characters are mostly not sexually active, though one is married and another is shopping for a wife in his home port. In one past campaign, one of the player characters had access to a magical house of heart's desire where she could be sexually active with no risk of pregnancy, and made a point of using it; so when she and her lover had a big quarrel and had intense make-up sex (their tent fell down in the process!), I decided that she had gotten pregnant (she was a divine avatar and thus highly fertile!), and the characters got married by the campaign's end.

I rarely consider STDs, as my campaigns aren't usually THAT realistic, and, well, ick. But in a horror campaign based in a New Orleans sporting house in the 1930s, one of the PCs picked up something, and later passed it on to the ghost who was haunting the house. . . .

I have had incidents of nonconsensual sex. None of them was classic violent assault. In one, a prince of the fair folk used his glamour to control a PC's behavior, which got him killed by her bodyguard. In another, a customer did something with a sex worker that she hadn't agreed to, and in a later session she sued him for damages (the complaint was "civil rape"). In the third, the female PC changed her mind partway through, and the somewhat drunk male PC didn't get the idea right away (I remember the player rolling against his character's mental disadvantages and saying, "I have to play it"). That last one was notable for me because later that week, when I was have lunch with the woman who played the female PC, I asked her if that scene had been excessive, her whole face lit up, as happy as I've ever seen her, and she said, "It was great!" She was totally gloating over getting to play a really dramatic scene and having all the other players flinch. . . .

Other than that, everything from casual encounters to romantic love has shown up in my campaigns.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Icelander

We model this with the prospective father failing a HT check. Conception happens when both parties succeed at a roll based on HT, not when one of them fails, because people with low HT are probably not going to have children very easily.

How do we deal with situations where a woman passes a HT check but there are 2 males' germ cells competing for egg rights and they BOTH pass? Perhaps a Quick Contest between the males' HT? In accordance with "Competition Strategy in Humans" (a 2004 paper in Evolutionary Psychology by Gordon G. Gallup (UoNY@Albany) and Rebecca L. Burch (UoNY@Oswego) which was highlighted in 2009 by Scientific American) whoever goes last should probably get some kind of bonus due to "scoop out" theory.

I don't know how you would resolve a 3-way contest though.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Purple Snit

Certainly, random rolls for "horrible genetic mutations" seems excessive.

Unless, of course, the game is such that the mutations come with kewl powerz, or horrifying ones a la "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Omen".

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Plane

How do we deal with situations where a woman passes a HT check but there are 2 males' germ cells competing for egg rights and they BOTH pass? Perhaps a Quick Contest between the males' HT? In accordance with "Competition Strategy in Humans" (a 2004 paper in Evolutionary Psychology by Gordon G. Gallup (UoNY@Albany) and Rebecca L. Burch (UoNY@Oswego) which was highlighted in 2009 by Scientific American) whoever goes last should probably get some kind of bonus due to "scoop out" theory.

I don't know how you would resolve a 3-way contest though.

If the male and female parties pass their HT rolls (which have some sort of penalty, of course), pregnancy results. If there are multiple successes among males, the father is the one who had the highest margin of success. Give bonuses as you believe is appropriate for the "scoop out" theory.

[SteamBub]

Some ideas for benefits of sex might be better moral for those involved, information gathering for the femme fatale, blackmail of a character, or better patron/rank/contact benefits. For perils, dependencies, not being able to do anything 5-9 in-game months or more, blackmail, and family problems (like your in-game mother not wanting you to adventure now with a kid or bloodline feuds of aristocrat kind).

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

If a female character critically fails during the Contest of HT and the male character succeeds,

It's been a while since I played GURPS, but are critical successes and failures a part of contests as well?

[sjard]

<Moderator>
I'm closing this thread because it really is beyond the scope of the game in and of itself. This is a subject best left to blog posts and not these forums.

Thank you.
</Moderator>