Well, there’s always FATAL - the RPG system that required dice rolls for things such as “anal circumference”, multiple dice rolls to determine breast size, and a Urination skill which requires you to pass a skill check to be able to use the facilities (but if you do pass that skill check, you can dispel up to a gallon of fluid at a range of 16 feet without having actually had anything to drink first!)
Some of the groups I’ve played with could occasionally spent a lot of time on a seduction, but we never had any in-the-group romances. “Baseball games” involving other parties would be more or less described depending on our mood: sometimes it’d be along the lines of “I’ll see about hooking up with one of the wenches” “[description of available wenches]” “the short brunette” “couple rolls ok, you’re in and it costs you thismuch.” Other times…
There was that one time we were invited to a party to celebrate our recent victory against Ye Badde Olde Band Of Orcs and the golem* figured he’d try and find out how many ladies he could seduce before the night was over. He got slapped a couple of times, got a home run and was on his way to another when the Bad Guy Du Jour hit (the dude the orcs had been working for). It was the same time the Bad Guy got turned into a tree and decorated with multicolored lights twirling around his [del]head[/del]crown.
Then there was that one time where we were investigating an abandoned dwarven city: a dwarven warrior, the golem, a kender with a magic pan (+50 to Cooking, we were using MERP rules), a bat whose familiar was a mage** and 40 dwarven hireswords. And then at one point the dwarves found out that our dwarven warrior was female. Oh boy. They kept trying to protect her, a few of the older ones tried to get paternal and tell her she “should go back home and find herself a nice boy to marry”… if I understand The Three Stooges brand of humor correctly, imagine The 40 Dwarven Stooges fighting for the affection of a dwarven lass who was Not Interested, Damnit!
not officially one, but the player was a minmaxer. We nicknamed his warriors “the golem” because they were human only if you stretched the definition a lot.
** officially it was the other way around but the bat was smarter than the human, or at least less suicidally stupid.
Yes; they don’t (in most books) enjoy it particularly. It doesn’t really cause them much physical pleasure, on account of being dead. Although the vampires themselves do basically say that drinking blood is better than nearly any mortal pleasure anyway.
The RPGs I’ve been involved in tend to “fade to black” when characters wanna get bizzay. Our imaginations are usually better than anything the GM can come up with anyway.
As it happens, I’m now GM of a game in which a female PC was happily having a torrid affair with a male NPC. I was discreet, and when she wanted to have her romps in the garden of Eros would just say, “You and the guy have some private time and wake up the next morning a bit tired but happy.” After a few weeks of this, the female PC got pregnant. Her player was a bit indignant, but I noted that she’d never said anything about using birth control. Her character’s pregnancy (still in the early stages) has since been an interesting complication in how she goes about adventuring.
There’s a few modern indie RPGs that try to tackle sex and relationships in a more mature manner. Apocalypse World comes to mind, where sexual encounters have a mechanical effect on the characters involved. Even there, the expectation is that you’ll fade to black, rather than play out a blow-by-blow of the sex.
There’s also a concept out there called Lines and Veils. It’s not related to any specific game, but it’s about forming an agreement with your play group about how subjects will be handled. Some things are behind a ‘veil’; they can happen in the game, but you skip over the details. Some things are behind a ‘line’; they just don’t happen. In the games I play, sex is a veil subject, sexual assault is a line.
Most PCs of any decent level could fork over enough dough from one successful expedition to keep a kid fed, clothed, housed and educated until age 14 or so. Bear in mind the price of a single suit of plate armour is more money in one lump than the average quasi-medieval will ever see.
And it depends on the PC’s class, level and alignment, too:
Distressed Damsel, with babe in arms: Vilgreth! Vilgreth the Black! Here is your son! What are you going to do about him?
Vilgreth, high level CE wizard: reasons the conversation through to the conclusion where the forces of law purport to separate him from his wealthTeleport Other stunned silence from onlookers Mass Suggestion: “We will never speak of this”
Not necessarily that. Mostly it’s just that details of sexual encounters are irrelevant to characterization and plot (though the lead-up may not be). Just like you don’t generally need to role-play the details of meals and toilet and washing and the care of weapons or tack. You take whatever notice of these things the story requires and move on to more pertinent matters.
Me and a couple of friends rolled up characters for F.A.T.A.L once, and it was really horrible. Readig through that book is truly unsetteling. My char turned out as a seven year old girl with a C-cup, very big nipples, with a hymen resistance of 85%…
That book is among the most thinly veiled misogynistic, racist, rape-fantasy infested, incomprehensibly complicated, and truly silly crap I’ve ever read in my life. It’s astonishing someone actually created something like it.
D&D never was blow by blow though - an unspecified amount of stuff was happening in melee which led to combatants’ hit points being depleted but everyone still functional and un-maimed until the last of those hit points ran out. Similarly in Champions, you got tagged by a blow or an energy blast, you took some combination of stunning and wounding damage (the latter generally rarely) and possibly got knocked across the map, but the rules system didn’t focus on things like bones breaking, internals rupturing, bleeding wounds, and so on. Abstract again, to cover the look and feel of a superhero-comic battle.
And in both cases, as a rule, after barely surviving something that should have seen you in need of hospitalization for weeks to come, you’d be reporting fit for duty in anything from minutes to hours, or possibly a few seconds with the best of care.
Also, the rules of my Caste almost oblige me to speak ill of the educational standards of any city that would allow anyone to perpetrate such a nonsense as “RPG games”…
Because, sadly, to some players combat is the focus of the game. We call them ‘hack and slashers’. Also, because RPGs originally grew out of tactical simulations.
