“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 @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @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 @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs
Great point for sure! So how do you handle it in your campaigns?
@Imperor @dndhomebrew @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @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 @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @askgamemasters @worldbuilding @ttrpgs @Illuminatus
Interesting point, so how do you handle it in your campaigns?
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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 @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @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.
@Imperor @dndhomebrew @dnd@lemmy.world @DnD@kbin.social @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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